Artistic Inspiration

Today, animals play a large role in her work, whether she’s carving a wood figurine of a cow, or working on a large relief print that features a human-like figure with the head of a bird. In the past, she has created pieces from forged iron, including Leviathan Shabbat candlesticks and a menorah with a fish shape as its base. 

But Sturm-Gross calls wood her “main medium,” and in 2024, she spent three weeks as a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center, creating new wood sculptures, including pieces made through chainsaw carving. 

As a student, Sturm-Gross met supportive and encouraging professors who influenced her artistic career. This includes Associate Professor of Reproducible Media Kristina Paabus, who taught a printmaking course that sharpened Sturm-Gross’s focus as an artist. 

“There was something about it that just clicked for me,” she says. “I’d drawn. I’d painted. But something about carving the image was a total revelation.” 

That same semester, Sturm-Gross took a course on Jewish mysticism with Sam S.B. Shonkoff, who was then a visiting assistant professor of religion and Jewish Studies. The timing was significant: She saw how these fields of study overlapped, sparking her interest in combining art and religion. 

“A lot of the work that I make is connected to this Jewish theological canon,” Sturm-Gross says. “I’m very invested in this idea of a diasporic Judaism that is rooted in the place where one is… Part of that has been populating these theological ideas with plants and animals that I grew up around. 

“But I am even more interested in solving theological problems with my work,” she adds. “Nature and diasporic Judaism are both languages to discuss the actual point, which has a lot more to do with Revelation and has an exegetical focus. The important intermediary there is the texts themselves.”

Accordingly, at Oberlin, Sturm-Gross spent her days contemplating Hasidic texts and spirituality, while feeding her art practice through activities like a joinery class and a work-study program at the Penland School of Craft. She also developed the sense that as an artist, craft as a concept applies not only to the discipline of making objects, but also to the worlds of writing, thinking, and spirituality. She recalls taking a course about apocalyptic texts taught by Robert S. Danforth Associate Professor of Religion Corey Barnes ’98; many of these themes still come up in her work today. 

After graduation, Sturm-Gross wanted to find a job that allowed her to still make art. She spent a year in Chicago working for a furniture maker and for woodworkers before moving to New York. While there, she started creating window displays for Bergdorf Goodman, a job she still does on a freelance basis, in addition to teaching at spaces like  Makeville Studio. Sturm-Gross is also the art director of Gashmius, an online magazine “dedicated to Jewish mystical thought, practice, and culture” with a neo-Hasidic, progressive lens, as described on the magazine’s website. 

To date, her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, to name a few. But wherever she is, she always comes back to nature as a source of inspiration and spiritual nourishment. 

“There’s nothing more holy than the natural world, and it’s God’s most perfect art project,” Sturm-Gross said. “As an artist, I feel like I can only aspire to mimic the things in nature that I see.”

Oberlin’s BA+BFA in Integrated Arts program combines the rigor of an arts school with the well-rounded, interdisciplinary education of a liberal arts college. Learn more about this five-year program that’s tailored to each student’s academic and artistic interests.