Over the past few years, Julianne Wallace Sterling found herself an artist trapped in a car commuting to and from work. Many an afternoon, as she crawled every so slowly through traffic, she became interested in the people who occupied the streets, those who set up homes on the streets and the signs that implore and prod us along from all sides. She began drawing from candid photos that she took along the way, and painting on signs collected at junk yards. The body of work resulting from her fleeting observations is a mixed-media love song to her commute. She has created a series of oil paintings on traffic signs, and some include collage from found objects and street posters. The signs have often been tagged with graffiti making the art a collaboration of sorts with the anonymous street artist that first laid down some spray paint.
JULIANNE WALLACE STERLING is a Bay Area painter born in Southern California. She graduated from UC Riverside with a BS in Economics and pursued post-baccalaureate studies in art at San Francisco State. Her work has been exhibited at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston, Dacia Gallery in New York, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato and Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. She was awarded first prize at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2010 Juried Annual. Her work has been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle, art ltd., the East Bay Express, 7×7, and the Art in New England. Ms. Sterling’s work was selected for A.I.R. Gallery’s 9th Biennial in Brooklyn in March 2011. Most recently, Sterling had a painting selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2019, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Washington, D.C.