Gloria Sutton is an American art historian, critic, and curator. She is known for her scholarship on contemporary art, media theory, and exhibition histories, particularly the intersection of art and technology. Sutton is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University and a Research Affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [1]
Sutton is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. She is also a Research Affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [2]
She serves on the advisory committees of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA), and Boston Art Review, and is on the editorial boards of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Bloomsbury’s International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics series. Her research has been supported by institutions such as the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Getty Research Institute. [3] [4] [5] [6]
From 1997 to 2002, Sutton served on the advisory board of Rhizome, a pioneering nonprofit for born-digital art, helping to develop foundational frameworks for exhibiting, archiving, and theorizing internet-based practices. [7]
Her editorial career began at Afterimage , where she focused on the underrepresentation of minority voices in art criticism. She later became the inaugural editor of Art Journal Open, where she expanded the role of digital scholarship and public engagement in contemporary art history. Sutton co-curated the large-scale urban art exhibition in Los Angeles titled How Many Billboards? Art In Stead , organized by the MAK Center. She has also held curatorial roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. [8] [9] [10]
Her first book, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (MIT Press), was the first comprehensive study of VanDerBeek’s multimedia work and was translated into French in 2023, with a foreword by Olafur Eliasson. [11]
She has collaborated with artists including Jennifer Bornstein, Anna Craycroft, and Sara VanDerBeek, editing the first monograph on the latter. From 2016 to 2018, she worked with Renée Green on exhibitions and programming at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, culminating in the publication of Renée Green: Pacing (D.A.P., 2021).
Sutton is the editor of Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman (2025), the first scholarly monograph on Echelman’s large-scale, responsive sculptures. The volume features critical essays, archival materials, and full-color documentation exploring the artist’s interdisciplinary practice and the aesthetics of softness in public space. [12] [13]
Sutton’s writing has appeared in numerous landmark museum catalogues and scholarly publications, including:
Sutton's teaching, writing, and curatorial work advocate for feminist infrastructures, collective authorship, and the recognition of underappreciated cultural labor. She is a frequent speaker at cultural institutions globally. [16] [17]
Sutton earned her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program. She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). [18] [19]
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