Cole Sternberg (b. 1979, Virginia, USA) is a Los Angeles–based conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and writing. His work examines humanity’s existential paradox: the impulse to create permanence while remaining subject to the dominant and regenerative forces of nature and time. Across diverse media, Sternberg positions human aspirations, systems, and myths against environmental processes, questioning the endurance of art, language, history, law, and collective identity.
In recent years, his painting practice has increasingly foregrounded the environment as an active collaborator. Exposing works to wind, water, sunlight, and other natural forces, Sternberg allows environmental processes to shape the final image, positioning nature as a co-author of the work. Poetry and fragmented texts occasionally enter these compositions, suggesting narratives that resist full comprehension. His photographs interrupt temporal continuity, while sculptural, performative, and film-based projects pursue and deconstruct historical and cultural myths. Across these varied forms, erasure—of marks, words, histories, and environmental traces—emerges as a recurring strategy through which Sternberg examines impermanence, memory, and the limits of human control.
Sternberg’s ongoing project, The Free Republic of California, extends these concerns into a civic and conceptual realm, imagining a hypothetical nation with alternative constitutions, budgets, and social frameworks centered on equity, sustainability, and collective imagination. Manifesting through documents, symbols, public activations, and performances, the project functions simultaneously as artwork, social proposition, and civic critique.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the American University Museum (Washington, DC), El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA), Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Praz Delavallade (Los Angeles), Yeo Workshop (Singapore), The Hole (New York), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Sternberg’s works are held in major collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), American University Museum, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Villanova University, and Deutsche Telekom. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Whitewall, Issue, Autre, Hercules, Denver Post, Miami New Times, LA Weekly, Art Ltd., Architectural Digest, Sleek, Metal Magazine, Artnet, Cool Hunting, Santa Barbara Magazine, Carla, and Elephant.