Coleen Sterritt (born 1953) is an American sculptor known for abstracted, hybrid works made from a myriad of everyday objects and materials, combined in unexpected ways.
[Mallinson, Constance. "Between: Recent Sculpture of Coleen Sterritt," ''Coleen Sterritt: Between'', Turlock, CA: CSU Stanislaus, University Art Gallery, 2009.][Pagel, David]
''Los Angeles Times'', December 20, 2013.[Johnson, Cooper. "Tipping Equilibrium: Building an Aesthetic from the Contradictions of Organic and Geometric Form,]
''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Writers root her work in the tradition of Postminimalism, post-minimalists Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse and Nancy Graves, and Assemblage (art), assemblage artists such as Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Marisa Merz; she is sometimes associated with contemporaries Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Rubins, and Tony Cragg.
[Klonarides, Carole Ann. "Still Point: Coleen Sterritt — Sculpture (2011-17),]
''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018.[Frank, Peter and Andi Campognone, Andi. Curators’ Statement, ''Coleen Sterritt: Stuck to the World'', Riverside, CA: Riverside Art Museum, 2006.] Sculpture (magazine), ''Sculpture'' critic Kay Whitney suggests Sterritt's work "expands and reinterprets three of the most important artistic inventions of the 20th Century—collage, abstraction and the readymade"— in play with the traditions of Arte Povera bricolage and Surrealism, Surrealist psychological displacement.
Curator Andi Campognone considers Sterritt one of the most influential post-1970s artists in establishing "the Los Angeles aesthetic" in contemporary sculpture,
[Campognone, Andi. Introduction]
''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018. while others identify her as an inspiration for later West Coast artists creating hand-made, free-standing sculpture counter to trends toward interventions, public art and Environmental art, environmental works.
[Spaid, Sue. "Still Standing (After Balancing En Pointe for Nearly Four Decades),]
''Coleen Sterritt''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Constance Mallinson writes that Sterritt's work "walks a line between charm and threat, the natural, the industrial and the hand fabricated, rejecting easy associations for complex reads."
Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel calls it smart, funky and "subtly rebellious" in its refashioning of discarded material, dumpster finds, and art-historical lineages.
Sterritt has exhibited throughout the United States, in Japan, Spain, Kenya and South Africa, and in major shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE),
[Hugo, Joan. "Six Downtown Sculptors", ''Artweek'', April 21, 1979.] Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery,
[Korten, Noel. ''Natural Forces in Los Angeles Sculpture'', Los Angeles: Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, 1990.] among many venues. In 2016, she was named a Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Fine Arts Fellowship recipient.
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
Coleen Sterritt
Fellows. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Sterritt's work is featured in several public art collections and the books Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, ''American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions''
[Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. ''American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimension'', Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1990.] and ''L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980''.
[Kienholz, Lyn. ''L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980'', The California/International Arts Foundation, 2010.] In 2018, Griffith Moon published the retrospective catalogue, ''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017'', in collaboration with the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH).
[Griffith Moon Publishing]
''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Sterritt is based in the Los Angeles area.
Life and career
Sterritt was born in Morris, Illinois in 1953 and grew up in Chicago. Her early influences were her grandmother, Dorothy Button, a well-known local gardener and her uncle, James A. Sterritt, a sculptor and educator, who co-founded the 1960s casting conferences at the University of Kansas that later became the International Sculpture Center.
[Botello, Rochelle. "Space, Materiality and the Pursuit of the Poetic in the Everyday: A conversation with Coleen Sterritt and Rochelle Botello,]
''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Santa Monica, CA: Griffith Moon, 2018. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Sterritt studied at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BFA, 1976), where she created sculpture influenced by Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse, and feminist theory.
In 1977, she moved to Los Angeles to attend Otis Art Institute (MFA, 1979), where she studied with Betye Saar and Germano Celant, and was introduced to the work of Arte Povera and the California assemblage artists.
In 1979, Sterritt rented a large studio in a deserted Los Angeles industrial building, helping to pioneer a burgeoning downtown art scene.
[Hammond, Pamela. "Coleen Sterritt: New Expressionism," ''Images & Issues'', March–April 1984, p.29–31.][Drohojowska, Hunter]
"Urban Art"
''L.A. Weekly'', May 22, 1981, p. 6–8. Retrieved November 14, 2018. She also worked at the newly opened Al's Bar (American Hotel), Al's Bar, a key cultural hub of the time.
As a woman sculptor whose work ran counter to the era's dominant, almost exclusively male, Minimalism, Minimalist aesthetic, Sterritt embraced the openness of the Los Angeles scene, which was less burdened by male-dominated history and mainstream orthodoxies, exhibiting at museums, non-profit spaces, and the prominent Ulrike Kantor Gallery.
She was featured in several notable exhibits, including "Six Downtown Sculptors" (LACE, 1979),
"Downtown L.A. in Santa Barbara" (1980),
"Southern California Artists" (LAICA, 1981, curated by Barbara Haskell),
[Wilson, William. "Toward a Definition of Post-Modernism," ''Los Angeles Times'', February 1, 1981.] and "Natural Forces in Los Angeles Art" (1990).
After losing her studio space in late 1991, Sterritt lived in Ireland for six months and focused solely on drawing through 1993. She spent six months in New Mexico after receiving a Roswell Artist-in-Residence award in 1994;
[The Roswell Artist in Residence Foundation]
RAiR Alumni
Retrieved November 14, 2018. the two experiences significantly influenced the direction of her work.
[Register, Kathy. "’Drawn from L.A.’ highlights work of more than 40 area artists," ''San Gabriel Valley Tribune'', May 1996.] She has since had solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum (2006),
[Julia Couzens, Couzens, Julia. "Stuck to the World: The Art of Coleen Sterritt," ''Coleen Sterritt: Stuck to the World'', Riverside, CA: Riverside Art Museum, 2006.] the galleries d.e.n. contemporary (2006) and Another Year in LA (2014),
[Another Year in LA]
Coleen Sterritt– TORQUE
2014. Retrieved November 14, 2018. MOAH (2016),
and several university venues.
[California State University, Stanislaus]
Coleen Sterritt
The Art Galleries. Retrieved November 14, 2018.[Childs, Carrie. ''Coleen Sterritt: Up'', Claremont Graduate University, 1996.]
Work
Like her individual works, which begin with materials or found objects and develop out of intuitive choices and processes and chance, Sterritt's overall body of work has evolved organically.
Writers have characterized her art as a search for harmony between opposed formal, physical and psychological properties: organic and geometric, contained and expressive, natural and human-made, stable and unstable, rugged and delicate, independent and interdependent.
[Hugo, Joan. "Coleen Sterritt," ''Critics Choice: Downtown Artists'', Los Angeles: TransAmerica Center, 1984.] While her work is nonrepresentational and grounded in formal issues of line, plane, shape, space and form, she subverts that with an improvisational mingling of found, fabricated and natural materials gleaned from studio detritus, recycling bins, and construction dumpsters that smuggle in diverse references and elusive narratives and metaphors.
In visual terms, critics most often note her striking compositions that seem to threaten collapse,
"virtuoso acrobatic performance"
evoking movement, gesture and awkward equilibrium,
[Frank, Peter]
"Haiku Reviews"
''Huffington Post'', December 5, 2011. Retrieved November 14, 2018. and eclectic tactile effects.
[Gardner, Colin. "Art Throughout the City: Coleen Sterritt," ''L.A. Reader'', October 26, 1984.]
Early sculpture: 1978–1995
Sterritt first gained notice for tripodal, hut-like structures made of industrial and natural materials, such as yucca stalk legs, upon which she balanced river rocks (e.g., Loose Shorts, 1978).
[Knight, Christopher. "When Sculpture Goes Public", ''Los Angeles Herald Examiner'', Dec. 14, 1980.][Pincus, Robert, "The Galleries," ''Los Angeles Times'', June 15, 1984.] Over the next decade, critics such as Joan Hugo and Peter Frank (art critic), Peter Frank suggest her formal vocabulary and command of materials grew,
[Frank, Peter. "L.A. Art Seen", Review, ''L.A. Weekly'', January 29, 1988.] her forms evolving to include stick-impaled, tar-covered pyramidal forms, and later, vessel-like biomorphic forms sprouting appendages.
[Wolf, Leslie. "Coleen Sterritt at Karl Bornstein Gallery," ''L.A. Weekly'', June 22, 1984.] They described works such as ''Noche a Noche'' (1981)
[Coleen Sterritt website]
''Noche a Noche'' 1981
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. or ''O.W.W.I.H.'' (1984)
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. as "ominous, yet vulnerable,"
"fascinating and terrifying"
[Lugo, Mark. "Nairobi 95: Sculpture by Coleen Sterritt," ''San Diego Tribune'', September 9, 1983.]—alien plants or creatures, whose assertive physicality (mandible, tooth, thorn, and quill-like forms) evoked both allure and aggression.
[Hugo, Joan. "Ambiguous Presences," ''Artweek'', February 6, 1982.][Drohojowska, Hunter]
"Young Turks"
''Artforum'', February 1982. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Several writers trace that ambiguity to seemingly incompatible impulses: a "strangely primal, poetic urge"
to infuse her economical formal language with the energy of totemic ritual and mystery, a contemporary, Punk subculture, punk-like angst, and an eccentric, postmodern humor.
[Gardner, Colin. "The Galleries", ''Los Angeles Times'', January 24, 1986.]
In the later 1980s, Sterritt shifted toward work with smoother surfaces and restrained color, that some writers compare favorably to the work of Martin Puryear or Louise Bourgeois.
She also undertook greater compositional challenges and expression of movement, that critic Colin Gardner wrote "synthesized classical balance with rugged, idiosyncratic kinesis,"
such as ''Full Quintet'' (1985),
''Endear'' (1987), or ''Pike: For Earl the Pearl''
[Coleen Sterritt website]
''Pike: For Earl the Pearl'', 1988
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. (1988).
[Clothier, Peter. "Coleen Sterritt at Karl Bornstein Gallery," ''L.A. Weekly'', January 31, 1986.] Others recognized greater psychological tenderness and a "quasi-humorous pathos" in her ungainly, "lovable ugly ducklings,"
such as the swan-like ''Flush'' (1991), which features two forms in relation to explore issues of sexuality and desire, including separation and union, embrace and entrapment.
[Donohue, Marlena. "Sculpture Taking Its Lyrical Ease Beyond Gender in ‘Raw Grace,’" ''Los Angeles Times'', August 13, 1988.]
Sculpture: 1995–Present
After a period concentrating on drawing and her time in Roswell, Sterritt returned to Los Angeles in 1995. Influenced in part by her new studio situation, she began using tentative materials—recycled studio detritus (cardboard, carpet, plastics, plywood)—and significantly, pieces of recently dismantled sculptures.
Many of the new materials were relatively flat and planar; working intuitively, she engaged in basic assemblage processes: stacking, gathering, folding, arranging, slicing.
Critics suggest the change in methods both expanded her use of space and imparted a new sense of temporality and fragility in the work (e.g., ''My Original Face, In Two Piles, Now Hanging''
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. and ''Red Stack (Heartbeat)''
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. (both 1995), and later, ''SqueezeBox'',
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. a colorful, necklace-like construction from 2002).
Sterritt began incorporating found furniture and recognizable objects in her work in the 2000s, subverting the "form follows function" dictum in witty, "towering agglomerations" that suggested plants, animals or hybrids (e.g., ''Daddy-O'',
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. 2006).
[Mallinson, Constance. "Coleen Sterritt at d.e.n. contemporary," ''Art in America'', March 2007.][Satorius, Katherine. "Coleen Sterritt at d.e.n. contemporary," ''Artweek'', February 2007, p. 19.][Miles, Christopher, "Letting It Work On You," ''Khôra'', Santa Monica, CA: Mt. San Antonio College Gallery, Griffith Moon, 2017.] Her process has been described as resembling a "three-dimensional journal" with each decision and part "unusually transparent," the latter category creating a split mindset in viewers between the integrated sculptures and the disparate, often recognizable, components.
The juxtaposition of mass-produced and natural objects opened her work to unpredictable narratives and metaphors investigating the uneasy balance between nature and the built environment in works like ''One & Nine & Five & Three''
[Coleen Sterritt website]
Selected Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2018. (2004–05) or ''Diagramme de Navigation de Mon Coeur'' (2005), which was described as a "Vladimir Tatlin, Tatlinesque tower" whose "organic nervous geometry"
seemed a meditation on male/female relationships and the flawed promises of modernist utopianism and consumerist comfort.
[Whitney, Kay. "Coleen Sterritt: Rotation of Facts," ''Sculpture'', June 2017.]
In recent years, critics have distinguished Sterritt from assemblage artists considered to have a "grunge" aesthetic (e.g., Nancy Rubin or Isa Genzken), noting her increasingly harmonious, poetic, and humorous refinement and a mastery of materials giving her sculpture "the vivacity of an intimate doodle," despite its command of space.
Carole Ann Klonarides observes in later work in her 2016 MOAH exhibition, such as ''And Then Some'' (2012) and ''Over and Over (Flat White)'' (2013), "a certain precariousness, an unrepeatable act, and a unique timeless moment" she compares to the work of Constantin Brâncuși, Brancusi.
Drawing
Throughout her career, Sterritt has considered drawing to be a significant, tangential part of her practice.
Her works on paper employ a range of media, including watercolor, charcoal, oil stick, conté, pastel and collage. Like her three-dimensional work, Sterritt's drawings incorporate geometric and organic forms that she treats in a sculptural fashion to explore a similar precarious equilibrium; the work also displays a comparable awareness of materials (for example, paper as a form of wood, which she sometimes collages in bark-like strips).
Critics like Peter Frank suggest the drawings differ from her sculpture in their more delicate handling of abrupt shifts in shape and texture.
Sterritt's drawings have been exhibited at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery (1999), Armory Center for the Arts (1995), and Washington Project for the Arts (1983), and in conjunction with sculpture.
[Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College]
Coleen Sterritt
Permanent Collection. Retrieved November 14, 2018.
Teaching
Since 1998, Sterritt has been a professor and the faculty coordinator of the sculpture program at Long Beach City College, one of the state's largest community college art departments.
She is recognized for developing a sculpture program there that has enabled community college students to transfer to top art schools across the country.
[Cooper, Jacqueline. "Report from the Trenches: Teaching Fine Art at the Community College, ''New Art Examiner'', February 2000, p.30–1, 68–9.] From 1983–1999, Sterritt taught in adjunct and full-time, temporary positions at Claremont Graduate University, Otis College of Art and Design, University of Southern California, and California State University, Fullerton, where she was a Distinguished Visiting Artist. In 1990, Sterritt taught a collaborative course, "Art Majors/Dance Majors," at California State University, Long Beach with Margit Omar and postmodern choreographer Lucinda Childs.
Awards and collections
Sterritt has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2016),
COLA (City of Los Angeles, Sculpture, 2007),
[Canty, Scott. "Coleen Sterritt." ''COLA 2007 Individual Artists Fellowships'', Los Angeles: Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, 2007.] J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts (1996),
[Ayres, Anne. "As the Clock Ticks", ''Charting New Currents, Celebrating Ten Years of Grantmaking by the California Community Foundation'', Los Angeles: J.Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, 1998.] Art Matters, Inc. (1993) and National Endowment for the Arts (1986), as well as a Roswell Museum Artist-in-Residence Program award (1994).
In 2019, she received the International Sculpture Center's "Outstanding Educator Award."
[International Sculpture Center]
"Outstanding Educator Award,"
Awards, 2019. Public art collections holding Sterritt's work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
[Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles]
Coleen Sterritt
Collection. Retrieved November 14, 2018. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, and Scripps College Collection,
among many.
References
External links
Coleen Sterritt official website''Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017''
Retrospective catalogue, Griffith Moon, 2018
Deep Dive with Guggenheim Fellow and Alumna Coleen Sterritt
Interview, Otis College of Art and Design
Coleen Sterritt
Otis College of Art and Design, Outstanding Alumni
Urbanature – Coleen Sterritt and Constance Mallinson
online exhibition and essay at Times Quotidian
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sterritt, Coleen
American women sculptors
Sculptors from California
Artists from Los Angeles
Otis College of Art and Design alumni
University of Illinois College of Fine and Applied Arts alumni
People from Morris, Illinois
1953 births
Living people
21st-century American women artists