The Loft Hour: Andy Shanken + Stephanie Syjuco

Andy Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; keywords in architecture and American culture; and consumer culture and architecture. He is interested in historiography, particularly of architectural history, and the intersection of popular culture and architecture. Since this is too much for one person, he is looking to clone himself. Professor Shanken’s first book, 194X, examines how American architects and planners on the American homefront anticipated the world after the war. Broadly speaking, it is a cultural history of American architecture, planning, and consumer culture in this formative and strained moment for the architectural profession. His second book, Into the Void Pacific, looks at the architecture of the neglected 1939 San Francisco world’s fair. His third book, The Everyday Life of Memorials, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2022. He is currently working on the history of imagery in American urban planning. He teaches courses on most of these topics, primarily in the Department of Architecture, but also in American Studies. He is currently the Director of American Studies, Faculty Curator of the Environmental Design Archives, on the Faculty Advisory Committee at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Global Urban Humanities. He has a joint appointment in American Studies.

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

Lauren Kroiz is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on art and modernism in the United States during the twentieth century. She is a Faculty Curator of photography, paintings, and works of art on paper at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, as well as affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program and the Center for Race and Gender. She has taught a range of topics in the history of American art, photography, material culture, and modernism, including courses on avant-gardism, race and representation, thing theory, technologies of imaging, meanings of medium, and globalization. Kroiz is the author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (University of California Press, 2018) and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (University of California Press, 2012). Kroiz’s work has been honored by the Phillips Collection Book Prize (2010), the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists’ Publication Grant (2011), the Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award (2016), the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant (2016), the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Visiting Professorship at Freie Universität Berlin (2018), and the Midwestern History Association’s Jon Gjerde Book Prize (2019). She is currently at work on a project about whiteness and the visual culture of female suffrage. Before moving to Berkeley in 2013, Kroiz was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a postdoctoral fellow at the Phillips Collection’s Center for the Study of Modern Art, and a visiting professor at Bowdoin College.