Serena Cole was born to Californian suburban parents who lost their love for each other as soon as the pool was built on the honeymoon home. Afterward, her mother married a man because he looked like Tom Selleck, who lived on the top of mountain. Forced to leave the roller-skatable sidewalks of San Jose, at age eight she found herself living off-the-grid in the Sierra Nevadas and spent the rest of her childhood looking for the mall.
This extreme isolation from culture and civilization created a fetishized association with anything perceived of as high art, fashion, or wealth. She can still recall every page of the only Vogue she was ever given as a child. This incurable affliction followed her into adulthood and her art career, where she studied painting at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
She works from an irrational, unyielding desire to enter the unattainable through her highly detailed paintings and drawings. Positioned as both hopeless outsider and wary researcher, she creates work from her examinations of fashion advertising as a cultural anthropologist and an obsessive, self-aware consumer of highly seductive imagery.
She received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2011 from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at Hinterconti in Hamburg, Germany, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Marx and Zavattero in San Francisco, CA, Roberts and Tilton at Domestic in Los Angeles, CA, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, and Phillips de Pury and Dodge Gallery in New York, NY.
She is currently an instructor at the Art Studio at UC Berkeley and lives and works in the Bay Area.
Serena Cole is part of the Color Space Editions x SooVAC Collection, curated by the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN
