Sterling Ruby’s Mixed Media

Vernon, California, is a small city near Los Angeles with a population of a hundred and twelve. Every day, fifty thousand people commute to work there, in its eighteen hundred factories, warehouses, and small businesses. Light fixtures, Farmer John hot dogs, industrial chemicals, Tapatío hot sauce, and stuffed toys are made in Vernon. One of the many industrial employers on Soto Street is the artist Sterling Ruby, whose large-scale paintings, collages, multimedia sculptures, blistered ceramics, and other mammoth works are created in a former hand-truck factory with the assistance of a fifteen-person staff. Since 2008, when Ruby had his first major show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (moca), his works have entered the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pompidou, and Tate, and private collections from Miami to Beijing. Read more at The New Yorker.