Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images

Coming Soon | Great Hall

Friday, January 15, 2027—Sunday, May 23, 2027

Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images is the largest presentation of Oakland artist Stephanie Syjuco’s work in California to date, and her first major hometown exhibition. Originally presented by the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the exhibition brings together Syjuco’s photographs, collages, sculptures, and installations that examine how images shape our understanding of history, power, and belonging. Previously commissioned work created with the Filipino American National Historical Society for the Frye Art Museum exhibition, along with a new video created with Stephanie for the OMCA exhibition, add local and personal dimensions to the presentation.

Born in Manila and raised in the Bay Area, Syjuco has made Oakland her home and workplace for many years. Her practice draws on photographs and objects from US institutional archives as she addresses the legacy of US expansion, including its occupation of the Philippines. She carefully alters, rearranges, and rephotographs the US-narrated archive and reveals the role of image-making in preserving structures of power. 

After/Images invites visitors to look behind the images and see the tools, stages, and choices that shape what a photograph tells us. Using photography and printing tools such as color-calibration charts, Photoshop, collaging, and even her own hands, Syjuco makes the process of image-making visible. Throughout the exhibition, glimpses of chromakey green, staged photographs, props, mannequins, and video installations transform OMCA’s Great Hall into a dynamic space where image-making unfolds. Rather than treating the archive as an objective record of the past, she intervenes in it—cutting, layering, pixelating, crumpling, and tending to images and the people within them. In doing so, she “talks back” to the archive, questioning who has had the power to shape history and whose stories have been left out.

By repurposing the tools used to construct images and histories, Syjuco returns care and agency to the people represented in them. Her interventions invite visitors to look more closely, question what they see, and imagine how photographs and archives might be reshaped to tell more complete stories of the past. 

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Highlights

Stephanie Syjuco, Tender, Sifter, Keeper, Center, 2024.
Stephanie Syjuco. Fruits of Plenty: Inverted/Oriental (Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, circa 1900, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, NMAH.AC.0060.S01.01.Warshaw), 2021. Archival digital print. 41 x 60 in. Framed. Frye Art Museum, Purchased with funds donated by Doug Carmean and Margie Morris, 2024.008.01. Photo: Jueqian Fang
Stephanie Syjuco, Fruits of Plenty: Inverted/Oriental (Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, circa 1900, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, NMAH.AC.0060.S01.01.Warshaw), 2021.
Stephanie Syjuco, Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019.
Stephanie Syjuco, Block Out the Sun (detail), 2019.
Stephanie Syjuco, Master, Photographed (Albert Bierstadt, In the Mountains,1867, oil on canvas, acc. no.1923.253, collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), 2022.
Stephanie Syjuco, Still Life Construct: Background as Foreground (staff photographer‚ tools, props, and supports, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), 2022.

Sponsors

Major support for Stephanie Syjuco: After/Images is provided by The Oakland Museum Women’s Board. The exhibition is organized by the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

*Header: Stephanie Syjuco. Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on laser-cut wood, chroma-key fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media. 204 x 240 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; and Silverlens Gallery, Manila, Philippines. Installation view of Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, September 6–December 29, 2019. Photo: Stephanie Syjuco