| Sharon Sutton | ||
| Birth Date: 1941 |
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Artist Gallery |
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| Sharon E. Sutton grew up in Cincinnati, where her mother, Egretta Johnson, was a housewife and former teacher in a segregated rural school. Her father, Booker Johnson, was a laborer who had only a third-grade education but scraped together whatever it took to help his daughter become a musician.
At age 5, Sutton played the piano in her neighborhood church, but the French horn became her instrument in sixth grade after she passed a citywide exam that admitted her to Walnut hills, a public school with a college prep curriculum. Sutton chose the French horn because she could borrow one from the school instead of having to buy a smaller instrument such as a flute or violin.
In time Sutton won a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music. In Manhattan, while working as a musician, Sutton became a developer of sorts remodeling an old brownstone into rent-controlled apartments. Her first tenant, a Columbia architecture alumna, suggested Sutton study architecture. Intrigued, she enrolled at Parson School of Design while continuing as a musician on Broadway. In1968 between student uprisings and the Parsons displacing 2000 minatory students and began constructing a gym she quit her schooling. The upshot was that the School of Architecture at Columbia recruited students of color, including Sutton.
Now with music no longer her main focus, the artist in Sutton took up printmaking. When she opened an architecture practice in a loft at 95 Fifth Avenue, she included a printmaking studio.
She is a woman with 5 degrees, (graduate of Manhattan School of Music with a Bachelor of Music, Master of Architecture from Columbia, Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Doctorate in Psychology form the City University of NY) – she has been a professional musician, an artist, an architect and a professor of architecture. Really though, she’s a community builder. For many years, she has brought people together to improve their neighborhoods.
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