Sterling Ruby (born in Bitburg, Germany, in 1972) is an American artist who works across ceramics, painting, collage, sculpture, video and textiles. His works are often presented in large, densely packed installations shaped by sources as varied as aberrant psychology, urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop, punk and violence. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith proclaimed him one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century. His work examines the psychological space where individual expression meets social constraint.
Born on an American military base to a Dutch mother and an American father, he grew up in Pennsylvania. He studied at the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. In 2003 he moved to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA at the Art Center College of Design, where he was a teaching assistant to Mike Kelley. He still lives and works in Los Angeles, with a studio in Vernon.
His practice is defined by its range of media and by the reuse of materials from his own studio. His collages repurpose the cardboard that protected the studio floor, along with bleached denim and fabric, in references to Gee's Bend quilts and Japanese boro textiles. His poured urethane Monument Stalagmites resemble cave formations, while his bronzes keep their welds visible rather than hiding them. In 2012 he began producing functional stoves based on the cast-iron stoves of his childhood farm, and in 2019 he showed STATE, an aerial video of California's prisons.
His paintings, made with spray paint on large canvases, are the most abstract works in his output and draw on layers of gang tagging in Los Angeles. His legacy lies in bringing graffiti, craft and minimalist traditions into a practice that questions the boundary between the public and the personal.}