Nationality American Website coleensterritt.com | Name Coleen Sterritt Known for Sculpture | |
 | ||
Born 1953 Morris, Illinois Education University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Otis College of Art & Design Fine Art Awards City of Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts,
Art Matters, Inc., National Endowment of the Arts | ||
Coleen Sterritt (born 1953) is a Los-Angeles-based artist, known primarily for her abstracted, hybrid sculpture. Working in a range of scale, she produces works made from a myriad of everyday objects and materials, combined in unexpected ways. Some compare her free-standing sculptures, made from quotidian materials, to works by Peter Shelton and Jessica Stockholder.
Contents
Sterritt's work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Crocker Art Museum, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art and Scripps College Collection, Claremont, California.
Early life
Sterritt was born in Morris, Illinois and grew up in Chicago. Her earliest influences were her maternal grandmother, Dorothy Button, a famed local gardener and her uncle, James A. Sterritt, an influential artist and educator. Jim Sterritt taught at the University of Kansas in the 1960s and co-founded a casting conferences, which later became the International Sculpture Center, with Elden Teft. He finished his teaching career at Washington University, St. Louis(1970-1994). Sterritt earned her B.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an M.F.A. from Otis Art Institute(now Otis College of Art and Design) where she studied under Betye Saar and was introduced to the work of Arte Povera and the California assemblage artists. Her move to downtown Los Angeles in 1978 coincided with the burgeoning downtown art scene, in which she played a significant role.
Early career
In 1979, her work was featured in “Six Downtown Sculptors” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. A year later, her work was included in the seminal “Downtown L.A. in Santa Barbara” (1980) exhibition at the Santa Barbara Art Museum and then “Southern California Artists” (1981) curated by Barbara Haskell for Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1982, she had her first solo exhibition with the Ulrike Kantor Gallery. Two years later, she starred in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's "Spalding Gray's Map of L.A." with Spalding Gray, Marshall Efron, and Mary Woronov; playing the role of Gray's girlfriend. In addition to having exhibited at Ulrike Kantor's influential Los Angeles gallery, she exhibited with Karl Bornstein Gallery (1984 and 1986) and Mark Quint Gallery (1981 and 1983).
Exhibition Highlights
Sterritt has had solo exhibitions at commercial galleries such as Another Year in Los Angeles (2013) and d.e.n. contemporary (2006). In addition to having had a solo exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum (2006), she has had numerous solo exhibitions in the university art galleries of Los Angeles Harbor College (2011), California State University-Stanislaus (2009); Claremont Graduate School (1996); California State University, Los Angeles (1990); Pepperdine University (1987) and Santa Monica City College (1988).
She also exhibits collage and drawing, and her work has been included in numerous drawing exhibitions such as “Draw, Paper, Scissors” (2006) at domestic setting, Los Angeles, CA; “Drawing the Line” (1999) at Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA; “Drawn from LA” (1996) at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; “LA Abstracts: Drawings” (1995) at the Schick Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, “Drawing: Personal Definitions” (1988) at San Diego State University, San Diego, CA and “Flatworks: Non-Three-Dimensional Works by Sculptors” (1983) at the Washington Project for the Arts in D.C.
Sterritt's work was included in “Natural Forces in Los Angeles Art” (1990), a Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery exhibition of works by 15 artists employing natural materials. She also exhibited works in “Selections from the Permanent Collection: 1975-1991” (1991) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and “Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art” (2006) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
Her work is featured in two influential significant publication: American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimension and L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980.
Teaching
Since 1988, she he has been a professor and the Faculty Coordinator of the Sculpture Program at Long Beach City College where she is acclaimed for having developed a sculpture program that has enabled community college students to transfer to top art schools across the country. Prior to joining the faculty of Long Beach City College in 1996, she taught at Claremont Graduate University (1983, 1985, 1988-1999), Otis College of Art and Design (1987-1993), University of Southern California (1989) and California State University, Fullerton, where she was the Distinguished Visiting Artist in 1986-1987. In 1990 she taught a collaborative course "Art Majors/Dance Majors" at California State University, Long Beach with Margit Omar and choreographer Lucinda Childs.
Awards
A 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Sterritt has been awarded numerous residencies, grants and fellowships including the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA) from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (2007), J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts /California Community Foundation (1996), Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (1994), Art Matters, Inc. (1993) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986),