About Sterling Ruby

Sterling Ruby is a versatile artist who works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, ceramics, video, and textiles. However, he refuses to be defined by any of these techniques. He draws his inspiration from very diverse social sources such as gang violence, street culture, globalization, and consumption. In 2002, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design.

Sterling Ruby was born on the American military base in Bitburg, Germany, from a Dutch mother and an American father. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to south-eastern Pennsylvania in the United States. It was here that Ruby came into contact with Amish quilts and the state’s signature red pottery. Both art forms would inspire him in his early artistic development in clothing design, sculpture, and ceramics.

Sterling Ruby’s works often raise questions for the viewer. This certainly also applies to his Stoves series. As the title suggests, these works are stoves, made of bronze and iron. They evoke the memory of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades from the early twentieth century. At the time, Duchamp took utensils, such as a bottle rack, out of their everyday context and moved the objects to a gallery. As a result, they were elevated to art on the one hand, but also made completely useless on the other. Ruby’s wood stoves are not technically ready-mades, nor are they useless. They are not existing industrial products but are designed especially by the artist and can actually burn. The heaters do not work optimally, after all, Ruby is not a specialist in the field of heating technology. As a result, these sculptures raise the question, perhaps even more than Duchamp’s objects, whether they are art or utensils?