Sculptors are prone to tactile expressions of themselves — and in his exploration of unlike materials and how they interplay with one another, local artist Levi Sternburg is continually finding out new facets to the core objects that comprise his pieces. We sat down with him to talk about what inspires him to create, how he arrived at his current practice and how he sees his work fitting into the local arts community.

What are the circumstances that made you the artist you are today?

I had a sort of a creative urge from a very young age, and my parents were very supportive of that. I think for them it was just something for me to do to distract me instead of getting in tussles with my brothers and doing crazy boy stuff. Give me some watercolors or some little clay to play with, and I would spend hours doing that. I went to Brandon for my entire K-12, and, by the time I was in high school, I was taking an art class pretty much every semester.

I knew I wanted to pursue something creative. My dad's a home-builder and remodeler, so I thought I could combine the two. So I went to school at South Dakota State University (SDSU) for my first semester. I was in the architecture program. I was into that for about two weeks, and then I switched to just get a sculpture degree.

What made you make that change?

I just really wanted to be an artist. I was thinking too practically about it at the time. I ended up taking a gap year and transferring over to University of South Dakota (USD) and I'd say that was the biggest influence on my life as an artist. I really thrived in that environment. I ended up getting a degree in sculpture, a minor in art history and a certificate in painting. And for once in my life, I got some really good grades, which was new. I was in a program where my day-to-day routine was just to make art and to pursue art and study art at whatever pace was comfortable for me.

I also worked as a gallery assistant in the gallery at USD for pretty much the whole time I was in school there. Amy Fill was my boss and also a mentor to me — she taught me a lot. Chris Meyer and Lauren Freese were huge influences on me, too. Being in that creative environment, I made some of the best artwork I had ever made.

In your time in Sioux Falls since graduating, you’ve worked with the organization Untitled.10, which aims to create art events in public spaces in the community — speak to how that got started.

I met (co-organizer) Tyson Schultz at USD, and he brought me onto the project right away. He graduated shortly before I did, and then we were both just sort of looking to make something happen in our community. This Sioux Falls arts community definitely had a little bit of a shift after COVID. A lot of the people who had been putting on programming for a really long time sort of passed the torch. There was definitely an opportunity for new programming. So we jumped on that, and we just kept that ball rolling. It’s been really gratifying for me — really rewarding.

Obviously, my own personal practice is very important, but to be able to be a curator and a co-director of arts programming through Untitled.10 has been really excellent. Just being a bigger part of the community and helping create opportunities for people that are in the same position as me, artists that are just trying to start out in Sioux Falls and to make a name for themselves. Bouncing ideas off of people, seeing other people's art, showing art with other people — that's what keeps me working, and that's what keeps the creative juices flowing.

What attracted you to sculpture as a primary medium?

It was a calling, honestly, to get cheesy about it. I remember I was a freshman in high school and I was getting really into drawing, doing portraits and stuff, and I was really into the shading and modeling and creating forms on paper in two dimensions. So I just felt this inkling — I want to make forms in 3D. I want to make it real. And then I got really, really into it. I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in high school, and I started making little figures based on our characters and painting and putting all kinds of details onto them. And I didn't really show anybody those pieces for two years, probably.

We had an art club at Brandon Valley High School, and you had to submit a piece, and then everyone who was currently in art club voted on the pieces that were submitted. And everyone loved my piece. So I just kept playing with it and kept making little things that I was passionate about. And when I was in school at SDSU, I got sort of introduced to the wider world of sculpture and different materials. Working with my dad, growing up in remodeling, working with wood and plaster and all kinds of things like that — just the way different materials interact with each other — that's always been really fascinating to me. So when I saw people doing plaster sculpture and metal casting, especially, I was like, “Yeah, I want to do that. I want to explore new materials.” I'm really fixated on the notion of pairing materials — wood, metal and concrete.

What is it about combinations of unlike materials that inspires your work?

I'm fascinated by all kinds of little minutiae in the world around me. And I love homes, too. I love buildings and architecture. Sitting in my house right now, I'm seeing plaster walls and wood tables and wood floors. And the little differences in texture, little differences in color — those just really fascinate me. It’s those innate properties. I'm colorblind, so I don't get super jazzed about mixing different colors together, but mixing the innate properties of different materials and the textures and colors that come from those… that gets me excited, that gets me going.

I really love history, too. I really love politics. And certain things like concrete or quartz stone, for example, those sort of draw up a sense of place, a sense of context in the world that we live in. So taking those influences and finding materials that sort of reinforce those influences is just another way that I can reflect my inner thoughts into my artwork.

What thematic threads weave through your body of work?

I would say the biggest overarching theme is the human figure, and I've sort of gone through iterations of how to use the figure and how to represent the figure. But even before I ever started really thinking about the concepts in my artwork, I was fascinated with and fixated on the way that human emotions — human feelings — are represented by movements of the human body. I think there's something psychological about the proportions of the human figure and the way the body moves. It just sort of triggers something that draws up emotions. It draws up feelings in someone who's looking at the work. So the human figure is a theme throughout a lot of my artwork. And I dabble in landscape kind of things. And color field painting is something that I try to get into for a while, but I always come back to the figure. Other influences would be geometry and symmetry, angularity… that kind of thing is a theme.

I guess the final theme across a lot of my artwork is smooth forms — let's put it that way. I get really easily overstimulated by really heavy texture, and really undulating, really overwhelming pieces of visual information are just not satisfying to me. So a lot of the stuff I make, I refine — I smooth out. And that's something that just satisfies me as an artist.

What experience would you hope a viewer would have when seeing your work?

I would want them to connect. I would hope that they feel a sort of metaphysical emotion. I try not to make artwork that is related to a certain specific culture or specific individual identity, but things that speak to the universal human condition. And I think my goal, I guess, is that universality — something that everyone can connect with. My new muse is fortitude. So that's the kind of stuff that I'm making now.

For a long time, I was trying gritty, emotional, tortured-artist-type stuff. I tried to tap into that. From the beginning, I wanted to make art that inspires empathy in other people. That's the mirror side of that universal metaphysical relatability of the artwork. But I hope that by making a piece that anyone can relate to, they can look into that piece and relate themselves to everyone around them. Empathy is something that I'm trying to produce more of.

What’s the current environment like for working artists like yourself in Sioux Falls?

As a working artist, it's brutally difficult, because artwork is valued differently than all other work. To be an artist means sacrificing so much time and dedicating yourself to your own concepts and also your own community. But it's worth every ounce of effort that you put into it. You get back everything that you put into your own artwork. There’s the personal practice side, the one that is in the studio, making something that you're passionate about or taking on a project that you're really excited about. And then there's the other side that's like bookkeeping and sales and marketing. And not everybody loves all of those. So there are certain practical parts of being an artist and being a working artist that you have to put time and effort into. So that's the hard part. But for someone to ask you what you do and to be able to say, “I'm an artist.” That's why we're all doing it. Because it’s just something that we can all be proud of.

What do you get back from creating art — what keeps you coming back to it?

Everything. Some people meditate. Some people work out. My sense of self comes back from art. A person's vision of themself is so amorphous, but if I can put myself into a piece of art and, when it's finished, I can step back and I can see myself, it's sort of like looking in a mirror. Grounding myself. And I haven't figured out a different way to do that. So that sense of peace — that calm, that tunnel vision that are so elusive for me — I can find that in the studio.

Mastering the Materials