Justin Sterling (b. 1992) born and raised in Houston, Texas. Now based in New York City, Sterling is a visual-based artist and trumpet player that began his practice as a figurative painter and sculptor. He has a MA in interdisciplinary Fine Arts from Parsons, with his chosen medium is the "city" or "built environment" that he appropriates to create poetic storytelling and a relationship with the urban and domestic, which in turn becomes a catalyst for social, political, and environmental discourse. Much of the visual language used in Sterlings work comes from his own experiences as a black man from the American South growing up in hurricane alley as well as influences from the Mississippi river, the history and styles of jazz, Caribbean and Creole culture, as well as the criminal justice system. Much of the research he continually does is related to the history of colonialism, indigeneity, and the ideologies that the West has forced upon the rest of the world. Sterling's goal is to take this colonial history and the strings that pulled towards total globalization and use them to re-stitch narratives for an increasingly dystopian present so that we can find new ways of decolonizing and understanding and visualizing prospective futures.
