Chelsea Steinberg
Ruthless Cosmopolitan [Chelsea Steinberg] (b. 1986, Brooklyn, NY) is a New York-based fine artist. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design, an MA in Jewish Art & Visual Culture from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase College. She is an alum of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts in New York. Her works have been exhibited domestically and internationally, as part of the Sixth Edition of the Jerusalem Biennale, at Koresh 14 Gallery in Jerusalem, Rural Contemporary in Cividate Camuna, Lombardy, Italy, at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College, The Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, The Gallery at the Performing Arts Center at Western Connecticut State University, The Tremaine Gallery at the Hotchkiss School, and the Sheila Johnson Design Center Gallery. Her public art work consisting of an installation housed inside a 1969 Lincoln Continental was exhibited on Fifth Avenue in 2023, as part of the Parsons MFA exhibition Matter As Fallen Light. She has performed at the Bronx River Arts Center, in the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, at The John L. Tishman Auditorium at The New School for Social Research, and at Unity EcoVillage in Kobina-Ansa, Ghana. Her work has been featured in ArtScope, Art New England, AJS Perspectives, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Jewish Week, The Jerusalem Post, Exponent II, Sunstone Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and Verklempt Magazine.
I’m a multidisciplinary fine artist in search of a place that does not exist. My objects, installations, and performances are devised to operate as protective amulets and rituals for vulnerable individuals and communities. Drawing from art history, pop culture, current politics and reporting, and individual and collective memory, I invoke reappropriation theory, amuletic iconography, and ceremonial practices to sublimate contemporary diasporic experiences of violence. Weaponized words, images and objects become tools for protection, self-determination, compassion, and survival. Rooted in the 1990s Brooklyn of my childhood and the Eastern European Jewish diaspora of my ancestry, I make work in search of relation, the moment when an object, gesture, or idea bridges interpersonal gaps and invites compassion. I strive for nuance in a world of binaries, how to be both/and, how to hold rage and softness in simultaneity: how to exist as a Jewess in this moment, or in an imaginary future.