Artist’s Statement
My artwork is a celebration of the complexity of self-portraiture and the intersections of my personal story with narratives and symbols of contemporary American culture. I work in a variety of media including installation, photography, video, and sculpture. My artwork is often packed with meaning and conceptual parameters which induce both joy and anxiety — an intentional fullness of emotion born from the sharing of my own conflicts.
My primary body of work is the Society of 23. The Society of 23 is a mysterious brotherhood of 23 gentlemen all portrayed by myself. As an American, I find a similarity between the development of America as a society with its complicated history and amendments and the content and construction of the Society of 23’s own nonlinear narrative. As a gay man of Filipino ethnicity, I feel positioned on the fringes of American culture, so the Society of 23 is a fantasy universe of world-building where I can operate in a fully humanized manner.
But we were together, and out of this fraternity something binding might come, to give us some sort of a foothold in America. —Filipino-American writer Carlos Bulosan in America is in the Heart
Curriculum Vitae
Click here to read my CV.
Biography (Short and Sweet)
Jeffrey Augustine Songco (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist. Born and raised in New Jersey to devout Catholic Filipino immigrants, his artistic identity developed at a young age with training in classical ballet, voice, and musical theater. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the USA including the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. He is featured in the publication Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, and his own writings have appeared in Art21 Blog, Bad at Sports, HuffPost, and Hyperallergic. He resides in Allendale, Michigan.
Biography (Long and Romantic)
Jeffrey Augustine Songco (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and baptized in New Jersey to devout Catholic Filipino immigrants. His artistic identity started at the age of 6 when he enrolled at the New Jersey School of Ballet. At age 10, he made his professional theater debut as Jerome in South Pacific at Paper Mill Playhouse. He went on to perform in several other productions at Paper Mill Playhouse including the American premiere of Children of Eden and Gypsy, starring Deborah Gibson and Betty Buckley. He was also a performer as a violist with his public schools’ orchestras, and as a singer with the 1996 ACDA National Children's Honor Choir and the 1997 North New Jersey Junior Regional Chorus.
In high school, Jeffrey shifted his focus from the performing arts to the visual arts. His playbill design for his school's production of Anything Goes was nominated for a Paper Mill Playhouse Rising Star award for Achievement in Graphic Design. In 2000, he was enrolled in the summer high school student program at Cooper Union where a field trip to a local gallery introduced him to Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991).
In the fall of 2001, Jeffrey enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art with a concentration in Printmaking and a focus on intaglio. Three months later, he was initiated as a brother of the Theta Xi fraternity. During his undergraduate time, Jeffrey began working with self-portrait digital photography, performance art, and a new love of installation art thanks to his frequent visits to Mattress Factory. In 2005, Jeffrey received his BFA with honors and finally came out of the closet. He continued to reside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he worked as a bartender at the popular downtown gay nightclub before moving to Bushwick, Brooklyn. While in Bushwick, he participated in Bushwick Open Studios, created the Dream Captcha, and tried to make it as an artist in NYC.
In 2009, Jeffrey enrolled in the graduate program at San Francisco Art Institute with a concentration in New Genres and a focus on installation and performance art. During his graduate time, Jeffrey also developed his writing practice in art criticism, eventually becoming one of eight international MFA students to write about the graduate art experience for Art21 Blog. In 2011, he received his MFA with honors and entered one of his thesis sculptures, GayGayGay robe, into ArtPrize, the international art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
From 2011 to 2016, Jeffrey was the Director of Operations at a technology start-up in San Francisco. During this time, he continued to exhibit his artwork at venues around the country including his first ever solo gallery show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco, and group shows at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco curated by Glen Helfand and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids curated by Heather Duffy. He became a contributing writer to online publications such as Art Practical, Bad at Sports, HuffPost (née Huffington), and Hyperallergic where he credits his confidence in his writing to Hrag Vartanian. Jeffrey was also nominated for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA Art Award.
Following his fourth ArtPrize in 2016, Jeffrey moved to Grand Rapids. One month later, he went to a local holiday artist market and saw a beautiful ceramic spoon rest that he desperately needed for his new kitchen. Upon checkout, he looked up and met Jeff Ham of Jeff Ham Ceramics, the potter who created the spoon rest. Jeff and Jeffrey are now living happily ever after with their rescue silver lab-pitbull, Mellon. In 2017, Jeffrey was featured in the publication Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, returned to the stage as Paul in Circle Theatre's production of A Chorus Line, and was the Installation Category Juried Award winner at ArtPrize Nine. His dreams of exhibiting in NYC and being on Broadway both came true in March 2018 with the SPRING/BREAK Art Show art fair in Times Square with room curation by Marly Hammer + John Richey. While sitting at home and scrolling through Instagram, Jeffrey jumped up and screamed in excitement when he saw that Klaus Biesenbach had shared a photo of Jeffrey's GayGayGay robe on his personal Instagram feed. The Jeffs cried happy tears for a few minutes.
In 2020, Jeffrey debuted his first solo gallery show in Chicago at FLXST Contemporary a week before the city’s COVID-19 Stay at Home Order took effect. During the shutdown and the reckoning of racial injustice, Jeffrey focused his attention locally and outdoors with the creation of the permanent street mural Pride Pad and the large-scale installation Tropical Realness, both made possible by Downtown Grand Rapids, Inc. In January 2021, he completed his first ever artist-in-residence program at the Mattress Factory in a fully remote way and is proud to have exhibited his solo show Society of 23’s Trophy Game Room at the museum 20 years after his first visit. In October 2023, Jeffrey’s sculptural series Facets was installed at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids.
Today, Jeffrey lives and works in Allendale, Michigan and continues to dream about being a US representative to the Venice Biennale. For nearly two decades, he specifically dreamt about being the US representative to the 2023 Venice Biennale, but due to pandemic-related calendar changes and the trajectory of his career, there is no longer a 2023 exhibition and Jeffrey was not selected as the national representative. TBD on a new dream 🙂 ❤️. In 2024, Jeffrey, Jeff, and Mellon welcomed their newest family member — a blue Frenchie named Tommy. Jeffrey is proud to be a former board member of Circle Theatre and current board member of Mattress Factory and encourages everyone to donate to both organizations.
Press
My CV has a great list of selected press. Click here to see additional press highlights. Below are some nice quotes about me.
“Jeffrey Augustine Songco’s videos, photos, installations, and interactive projects deal with many dimensions of identity: racial, sexual, religious, and national. Songco is an artist who embarks on complicated projects that employ loaded signifiers, but he proceeds with playfulness and humility, offering reflections on how these journeys unfold.” -Kevin Buist, Former Artistic Director of ArtPrize
“Songco’s practice undulates between performance and installation, crafting and articulating his own narratives, exploring the highly complex nature of self-portraiture, where one thing leads to another… in an endless hall of mirrors.” -Amanda Krugliak, Arts Curator at University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities
“As a gay American man of Filipino ethnicity, he has a unique point of reference that he articulates in a way that is at once playful and political.” -Maneula Paz, Director of Development and Strategic Planning - ICI (Independent Curators International)
“Songco’s art ‘poses a challenge to… those who continue to embrace narratives of success and happiness while eschewing failure and failed bodies and missing the opportunity to nuance and show the affective stakes in identificatory practices of racial and sexual minorities.’” -Jan Christian Bernabe in Queering Contemporary Asian American Art
“In both the Trophy Game Room, and the [Society of 23] project itself, Songco cleverly and deftly distills the essence of what it means to be American into a collection of performative objects. At its heart, the American ethos is defined by a competitive, cut-throat spirit disguised to look harmless and fun through the celebration of sporting events, beauty pageants and academic competitions.” -Brienne Walsh in Forbes
Society of 23
You may have seen that a lot of my artwork revolves around a mysterious group of bros. Click here to learn more about the Society of 23.
