 | This article contains promotional content. (August 2023) |
Cole Sternberg | |
|---|---|
 Cole Sternberg, Sag Harbor, July 2013 | |
| Born | Cole Andrew Sternberg |
| Website | http://www.colesternberg.com/ |
Cole Sternberg is an American visual artist based in California. His work includes painting, photography, sculpture, installation, film, and writing, and addresses environmental and political subjects.
Sternberg was born in Richmond, Virginia. He studied business at Villanova University and earned a Juris Doctor from American University.
While attending law school, Sternberg held an early solo exhibition in a Washington, D.C., bar and gallery. His studies included international human rights, a subject he later addressed in his artwork.
Sternberg’s early paintings combined text with watercolor, oil paint, and spray paint. Words were frequently obscured by layers of paint. In interviews, he connected this use of text and erasure to censorship and misinformation.
In 2009, the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., presented Sternberg’s solo exhibition and those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. Sternberg described the exhibition as addressing war and human rights, drawing on his legal studies. Sternberg participated in Home at the El Segundo Museum of Art in 2014–2015. His contributions included three altered photographic posters depicting home-protection techniques and a backpack made of aluminum and concrete.
His later work incorporates environmental processes into painting. He has dragged works through oceans and lakes, suspended them in trees, and exposed them to snow, wind, and sunlight, allowing these conditions to alter their surfaces.
In 2015, Sternberg traveled across the Pacific aboard a commercial shipping vessel. During the 22-day journey from Japan to Portland, Oregon, he produced paintings, photographs, and film footage. He exposed paintings to storms on deck and dragged others alongside the vessel.
His project The Free Republic of California proposes an independent California through artworks, legal documents, national symbols, and policy proposals. It was presented in FREESTATE at the El Segundo Museum of Art from October 2020 to September 2021. The exhibition combined a proposed constitution and budget with flags, images, objects, and music.
From November 2022 to January 2023, Villanova University presented Sternberg’s exhibition thirsty while drowning. It included 15 paintings altered through exposure to wind, rain, and bodies of water, alongside photographic murals installed across several campus buildings. The murals incorporated images taken during his Pacific voyage.
Sternberg has also produced generative digital art. His Art Blocks projects include the spring begins with the first rainstorm (2022) and chaos comes with the summer haze (2023). Sternberg collaborated with Giga, a joint initiative of UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union, on a garden, a generative art project that uses school connectivity data to produce evolving digital imagery. The artwork changes in appearance and color to reflect stages of internet connectivity at participating schools. Giga presented the project at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais in November 2025.
In 2025, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara presented the wind is heavy which blows between a horse’s ears, an installation extending Sternberg’s The Free Republic of California project. Combining an image of a horse with text, the work inaugurated the museum’s Facade Project and was installed on its glass entrance doors and at its Chapala Street storefront storage space.
In June 2026, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) presented Sternberg’s along the high embankments, a site-specific installation in a concrete bunker at Presqu’ile Winery in Santa Maria, California. Sternberg was the inaugural artist-in-residence for the collaboration. The paintings were made using environmental processes, including painting canvases in the soil, suspending them in the wind, and pulling them through the Pacific Ocean. Some retained traces of soil and grass. Reviewing the exhibition for The Unibrow, Evan Pricco emphasized the relationship between the artworks and the bunker’s architecture, describing how wind, light, and the building’s openings connected the installation to its surrounding landscape.
Sternberg’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, American University Museum, and Museum of Old and New Art. LACMA holds a wave in four parts (2015), made with watercolor, acrylic, and saltwater on linen.
