Bio

(b) 1985 

Stern grew up in Germantown, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, the fifth of seven children. As a child, she always knew she was different. Drawing and painting gave her a voice to connect to others. Stern completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Minor In Art History at the University of Wisconsin. She was eager to gain experience and build personal, professional, and artistic relationships outside the Midwest. She lived in Portland, Oregon, for five years and a year in Austin, Texas, before accepting a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the University of Houston in 2014.  She received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting in 2017. 

Most recently, she accepted the Media and Moving Image Teaching Prize for Innovative Uses of Media in 2021 after combining newer technologies with art to address the challenges created during the virtual shift in teaching in 2020. She is primarily a painter but works with various media and processes, including acrylic, watercolor, and found objects. She has taught at the Katherine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston for the past nine years. When not creating or teaching art, she is reading, over-researching, biking, backpacking, running, collecting things —sometimes off the street, and creating and editing videos. She currently resides in Houston, Texas, with her spouse Luke. At the end of May 2023, she will be relocating to Perth, Australia. 

Artist Statement

During graduate school, I was diagnosed with a neurobiological disorder — a lifelong silent struggle and a life change I can no longer avoid mentioning.  My diagnosis, education, and treatment have changed my life; how I teach, consume information, connect with others, and understand and create my work.  My unrealized desire once was to create work that made others feel the way I do, and when I received that response, I felt connected.  I felt normal.  In some ways, I had unknowingly self-medicated with art my whole life. Now I see some of my works as clear documentation of my mental state. Some compositions are bombarded with content, layered with secret moments; other times, there's a simplicity, a calm, an ease, a clarity with both space and focus.  The consistency in all my works over the past nine years is known and unknown, both of which I value in equal terms.

  My paintings combine expressionism, moments of illusion, and abstraction to create narratives filled with layers of emotion, silent references, and art historical memory. The compositions vary between tight and spacious combinations of objects in a realm of invented, imposed, or distorted space. The setting is distantly familiar but never enough to indicate the terms in which all elements gather. I am interested in how we communicate through images in popular culture and how the meaning of imagery changes over time. My overall body of work is a contemporary homage to traditional still-life paintings. I use words, color, and hyperrealism to lure in a viewer. My works are also bound up in socio-political imagery and the ever-changing use of language. The thoughts portrayed in each composition are never explicit but often pull and push in contradicting directions.  In a way, I think my paintings are always silently shouting for your attention.