Coleen Sterritt

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. Writers root her work in the tradition of post-minimalists Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse and Nancy Graves, and assemblage artists such as Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Marisa Merz; she is sometimes associated with contemporaries Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Rubins, and Tony Cragg. 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 Surrealist psychological displacement. 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 works. 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 Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among many venues. In 2016, she was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fine Arts Fellowship recipient. Sterritt's work is featured in several public art collections and the books American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions and L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980. In 2018, Griffith Moon published the retrospective catalogue, Coleen Sterritt: 1977–2017, in collaboration with the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH). 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. Sterritt studied at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BFA, 1976), where she created sculpture influenced by Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse, and feminist theory. She also worked at the newly opened Al's Bar, a key cultural hub of the time. and "Natural Forces in Los Angeles Art" (1990). the two experiences significantly influenced the direction of her work. She has since had solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum (2006), the galleries d.e.n. contemporary (2006) and Another Year in LA (2014), MOAH (2016),

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. and eclectic tactile effects.

Coleen Sterritt, Flush, Fixall over steel & styrofoam armature, 84" x 81" x 15", 1991.

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). Over the next decade, critics such as Joan Hugo and Peter Frank suggest her formal vocabulary and command of materials grew, her forms evolving to include stick-impaled, tar-covered pyramidal forms, and later, vessel-like biomorphic forms sprouting appendages. They described works such as Noche a Noche (1981) or O.W.W.I.H. (1984) as "ominous, yet vulnerable," —alien plants or creatures, whose assertive physicality (mandible, tooth, thorn, and quill-like forms) evoked both allure and aggression. Several writers trace that ambiguity to seemingly incompatible impulses: a "strangely primal, poetic urge" (1988). and Red Stack (Heartbeat) (both 1995), and later, SqueezeBox, a colorful, necklace-like construction from 2002). 2006). 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. (2004–05) or Diagramme de Navigation de Mon Coeur (2005), which was described as a "Tatlinesque tower" whose "organic nervous geometry"

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. From 1983 to 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. J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts (1996), Art Matters, Inc. (1993) and National Endowment for the Arts (1986), as well as a Roswell Museum Artist-in-Residence Program award (1994). Public art collections holding Sterritt's work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, and Scripps College Collection, among many.