Artist Stephanie Syjuco To Give Plonsker Lecture

11:01AM / Monday, April 14, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Artist Stephanie Syjuco will be the featured speaker at the Williams College Museum of Art's annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art on Thursday, April 17, at 6 p.m. at the Williams Inn Ballroom.

The lecture will be preceded by a reception at the Williams Inn from 5 to 6 p.m.

According to a press release:

Stephanie Syjuco will discuss her dynamic practice spanning work in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and the excavation of archives. She has focused on how photography, in particular image-based archives, is implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. In this arena, her recent work has focused on the presence, absence, and framing of Filipinx and Filipinx-American experience in archives created by governments, the press, libraries, and communities. Syjuco subversively misuses the methods of cultural bureaucracy and categorization to reanimate the lives of images and the stories they depict.

"Together with students and classes, we have been pouring over the work from Stephanie Syjuco's Block Out the Sun series that recently joined WCMA's collection through the generous support of the Plonsker Family Fund for Photography," said Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director. "We are eager to host her as this year's distinguished speaker for the Plonsker Lecture."

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.

A long-time educator, she is an associate professor in sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, Calif.

The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker '61 and their son, Ted Plonsker '86, examines current issues in contemporary art. Past lecturers have included artists Arthur Jafa, Kenturah Davis, Sharon Hayes, Lynda Benglis, Cara Romero, and Jessica Stockholder.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

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Williamstown Studying Major Overhaul for Main Street

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:14AM / Wednesday, July 29, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town is working with a Worcester civil engineering firm to redesign Main Street with an eye toward a major project sometime in the next decade.

Community Development Director Andrew Groff was before the Select Board on Monday night to talk about Town Hall's use of a $500,000 state grant to do preliminary design on major improvements to that portion of Route 2 that runs from Water Street west to the Field Park rotary, through the middle of Williams College's campus.

Groff introduced the elected officials to Amanda Bazinet of Worcester's Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, who is helping the town to develop a plan for Main Street that would align with the commonwealth's Complete Streets Program.

"Our project goals, in addition to the increased pedestrian and bicycle accommodations, is just, in general, improving the sightlines and improving the intersection geometry," Bazinet said.

"Complete Streets … has a lot of different facets to it. As Andrew had mentioned, the goal is to improve the safety for all of the roadway users — not just the motorists. We're looking at improving it for pedestrians, bicyclists, anyone using a mobility device. We want to create streets that are safe for all ages and abilities to use. So, while bicyclists will still be allowed, legally, to use the roadway, we want to look at providing a separate bicycle accommodation along the corridor, whether it's a shared use path along both sides of the streets that is a little more accessible to young children or older people with disabilities to look at all transportation options."

One goal is to encourage "active transportation." The Massachusetts Department of Transportation, who the town hopes one day might fund the construction, has a "healthy transportation policy," Bazinet said.

That MassDOT funding would come through the Transportation Improvement Program, which is managed locally by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. The design work underway now is being done with an eye toward going after TIP funding years down the road.

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