Sterling Ruby (born January 21, 1972) is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, video, and textiles.

The artist has cited a diverse range of sources and influences including aberrant psychologies (particularly schizophrenia and paranoia), urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption.

Proclaimed as one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby's work examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.

His family relocated to the United States shortly after his birth, first to Baltimore, Maryland, and then to the rural town of New Freedom, Pennsylvania.

In 2003, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the MFA program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

While at Art Center he studied with artists Diana Thater and Richard Hawkins, and theorists Sylvère Lotringer and Laurence Rickels.

Cutting into the cardboard and rearranging formal compositions he finalizes the works by inserting pictures of burial grounds, prescription packages and other found images as a way of creating an autobiographical archeology or dig site.

For this series of works, the artist repurposes rags, fabric scraps, clothing, and denim that have personal as well as studio history.

Ruby has said of these compositions: 'They continue with themes, theories and concepts that have been central to my previous work, but I have been trying to make them abstract and formal, my attempt to connect to the historical lineage of Suprematism.

These works, which the artist views as three-dimensional manifestations of his collages, feature identical monochrome shapes to those evident in the ECLPSE series.

Traditionally, bronze casting foundries grind the joining welds out of the final sculpture to hide this step in the fabrication process.

There is an autobiographical element to these works, as the artist grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, that for a time was heated only by a wood-burning stove.

His ceramic works feature thick, vivid glazes and charred and gouged surfaces on rudimentary forms resembling baskets, vessels, or body parts.

In his Basin Theology series, basin-like vessels are filled with recycled fragments of earlier destroyed or damaged works.

His large color-field canvases, made entirely with spray paint, use a color palette ranging from deep blacks to acid greens and pinks, and appear hallucinogenic and gauzy.

The artist has suggested that layers of gang tagging in Los Angeles, evidence of clashes over territory, eventually turn abstract, ceasing to have a clear order, and in the end losing their original meanings and authority.

Ruby himself plays a bum, who transits a marginal landscape, neither nature nor manmade, where he occupies himself crafting what can only be called artworks from string, cast-offs and other bits of trash.

In the video, we see prisons dotted across the landscape of California; rolling hills, deserts, forests, farmland and rural areas open up onto sites that resemble cities.

The artists draws a connection to the ways in which war zones and conflict areas are shown in the media, via distanced surveillance footage or drone reconnaissance.

At his Los Angeles studio, Sterling Ruby bleaches large rolls of canvas and denim to use for his fabric collages and sculptures.

Taking inspiration from the quilters of Gee's Bend in Alabama, as well as Boro textiles from Japan, he makes quilts from scraps of the bleached denim and other materials left over from the production of other artworks.

[citation needed] The artist designed a large-scale quilt that served as a backdrop for the traveling performances of the L.A. Dance Projects: Murder Ballades.

The artist also created a large fabric backdrop for the set of Basilica Soundscape 2014, a two-day music festival held in Hudson, NY.

[14] In 2017, after Simons moved over to Calvin Klein, Ruby was enlisted to redesign the interior of their New York showroom, as well as the brand's Paris headquarters.

[16] The collection has evolved from ten years of experimentation and development in Ruby’s work in soft sculpture, quilts, backdrops and garments.

For years I have been privately exploring garments as a medium, as something that impacts the way one can think, feel, and move.”[20] Sterling Ruby’s designs were very unique as they incorporated much of his past contemporary art skills and works.

In 2012-2013 the artist presented the exhibition titled SOFT WORK at the Geneva Contemporary Art Center, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, and MACRO in Rome.