Where Freedom Reigns
From his ranch in Santa Ynez, artist Cole Sternberg envisions a new destiny for California
Written by L.D. Porter | Photographs by Sam Frost | Produced by Frederick Janka
A large, weather-beaten tractor sits in front of the metal-clad barn that serves as Cole Sternberg’s art studio in Santa Ynez. It’s an oversize symbol of how the artist’s life has changed since he and his wife, Kelsey Lee Offield, relocated here almost four years ago from Los Angeles. The couple now has a two-year-old daughter and an animal menagerie featuring chickens, pigs, a rescued mini horse, and a very friendly Saint Bernard. The entire homestead (residence, guesthouse, and studio) is solar powered. They’re even growing their own wheat to make flour.
But don’t let the bucolic scene fool you; in addition to the barn/studio, there’s a photography darkroom, a silk-screening room, and a kiln for ceramics. It’s really an art-making compound that just happens to be in the country. As the artist happily admits, having a ranch has “allowed me to think a little differently and create things with more flexibility. Now I can drag paintings in the dirt, leave them out in the wind or on a tree for weeks.”
As an internationally acclaimed artist whose works reside in major collections, Sternberg is known for exposing his art to the environment—especially ocean water—and goes to great lengths to obtain his desired artistic effects. In 2015, during a dramatic 22-day voyage on a shipping vessel from Japan to Portland, Oregon, he threw one of his paintings into the water and watched it drag alongside the ship. After retrieving it, “it felt like this miracle,” he says, “because you really felt the water in the work. So that started me off exploring creating environmental patterns [on paintings]; whether it’s the movement of the water, or light through a forest, or rings of a tree. All those things come out when you expose them to the elements.”
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Sternberg had a peripatetic childhood that stretched from Saratoga, California, to Stuttgart, Germany, during his middle school years. By the time his family returned to California, “I’d seen 30 countries and fell in the fountain at the Louvre,” he says. Pennsylvania’s Villanova University followed, coupled with a return to Germany for a study-abroad year, culminating with a B.A. degree in fine arts and business.
His next step was highly unusual—at least for a future artist: He earned a law degree from American University in Washington, D.C. “I was always drawing or painting, but I didn’t think [making art] would be a viable way to buy food or have a roof over my head,” he explains. (Even so, he mounted his first art show at a bar during law school.) An entertainment law internship brought Sternberg to Los Angeles, where he finally ditched his day job to become a full-time artist.
As it turned out, his legal background provided the impetus for Sternberg’s most ambitious and far-reaching project yet: an exhibition documenting the infrastructure for a new country known as The Free Republic of California (thefreerepublicofcal ifornia.com). Although the premise of the work assumes California has seceded from the United States, secession is not the primary focus. “It’s more about what a more enlightened nation could look like,” says the artist, who wrote a 54-page budget for the new country, recasting funds California currently sends the federal government for income taxes and directing those funds to uses he considers more effective: universal health care, free higher education, low-income housing, and more.
Sternberg also drafted a new constitution addressing many issues currently confronting America—a document that “redefines a constitution for modern times with dreams of peace and environmental stability at the forefront.” There’s no electoral college, the death penalty and torture are outlawed, weapons are strictly regulated, and political campaign financing is severely limited. Discrimination based on race, sex, age, origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, conviction, health and/or disability is prohibited, and equal pay is guaranteed regardless of sex.
Of course, Sternberg’s art figures prominently in the exhibition, including a new hand-stitched California flag, official seal, and letterhead. He designed campaign-like propaganda posters, lawn signs, and buttons. He even created a clothing line, and silkscreened 500 items by hand. (The first batch of custom clothing was stolen from a warehouse, but the artist—true to the cause—hopes he’ll see protestors at future demonstrations wearing contraband Free Republic of California T-shirts.) Works on paper blending his painting practice with vintage photographs of Yosemite National Park are also part of the show. The exhibition, “Freestate: The Free Republic of California,” opens October 8—virtually and by appointment—at ESMoA in El Segundo (esmoa.org).
