Coleen Sterritt

Coleen Sterritt

Fellow: Awarded 2016
Field of Study: Fine Arts

Competition: US & Canada

For close to 40 years Los Angeles artist Coleen Sterritt has fabricated hybrid sculpture evoking the interplay between nature, culture, and lived experience. Her source materials are pulled from everyday objects and elements. Plaster, tar, pinecones, fishing line, found furniture, and studio refuse are just some of the components she uses to construct and express her richly evocative formal language. Questioning the diverse possibilities of sculpture in both scale and form, her eccentric, abstract structures present strong polarities possessing a resonance at once familiar and obscure.

Sterritt’s sculpture and drawings have been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Long Beach Museum of Art; Lancaster Museum of Art and History; Oakland Museum of California; PØST; Riverside Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Skidmore College; Washington Project for the Arts; The Women’s Building, L.A.; The University of Madrid, Sala de Bellas Artes; and the Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca, Spain.

Her work is held in public and private collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A.; The Crocker Art Museum; Scripps College Collection; Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, NM; Nestlé USA; and The Capitol Group Companies, L.A., New York, & London. She is also a recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Art Matters, The J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts /California Community Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA) from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Sterritt was born in Morris, Illinois and grew up in Chicago. Her earliest influences were her grandmother, Dorothy Button, a famed local gardener and all-round maker and her uncle, James A. Sterritt, the sculptor and influential educator who both instilled in her a reverence for nature and a love of the handmade. She received a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and a MFA from Otis Art Institute, now Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles in 1979. Her teaching career began in 1983 and has included positions at California State University, Fullerton; Otis College of Art & Design; USC; and The Claremont Graduate University. Since 1998 she has been a professor and faculty coordinator of the sculpture program at Long Beach City College.

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