Sterling Ruby

(American, born 1972)

Sterling Ruby is a contemporary American artist. Working in a multidisciplinary practice, Ruby often pulls from a wide range of socio-economic topics to create politically charged work. In his 2008 solo exhibition “SUPERMAX 2008,” the artist converted the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into a dense installation invoking the harsh living conditions of the American prison system, displaying a range of objects covered in fake blood and red polyurethane. In Ruby’s series SOFT WORK (2012), consisting of loose fabric sculptures sewn out of the American flag, he offers a playful means of confronting the pitfalls of overt patriotism. Born in 1972 on an American Air Force Base in Bitburg, Germany, Ruby worked in construction before entering art school, a skill that later would inform his work. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and then attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he worked as Mike Kelley’s teaching assistant and took classes from Semiotext(e) founder and theorist Sylvère Lotringer. His work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.