Picturing Places and Spaces

The title of this lithograph suggests a café-lined street at night and perhaps the presence of a woman, but Sutton's print is an arrangement of ovals set in rectangular boxes arranged in vertical strips. The ovals are filled with courses of bricks positioned at an angle, and their color changes when moving from bottom to center and then from center to top. The color within the rectangles also varies between the horizontal rows. Sutton uses repetition but also creates a sense of movement as the alignment of rows and colors shift. Sutton's lithograph is one of six prints in the series, American Portfolio, that also included prints by Romare Bearden, Lester Johnson, Alice Neel, Henry Pearson, and Will Barnet. Sutton's is the only non-figural image in the series, but her inclusion of "silk stockings" in the title may refer to the woman wearing the stockings who experiences the glimmering lights of a city street.

Sharon Sutton has been described as a Renaissance woman with degrees in the fields of music, architecture, philosophy, and psychology. She has worked as a professional musician, and she studied printmaking. In 1983 she was one of twenty-two artists in the exhibition, Celebrating Contemporary American Black Artists, at the Fine Art Museum of Long Island. In her artist's statement for a 2014 solo exhibition, Sutton stated: "My works on paper are investigations of the grid. They explore the modularity that is ubiquitous in the cityscape. Modular elements are efficient, easily stacked, multiplied, and substituted one for the other, but that can also be monotonous and graceless. My works seek to achieve surprise and elegance." Sutton primarily is recognized for her work as an academic in the field of Architecture and Urban Design and has been a faculty member at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. At the University of Michigan, she was the first African American woman to be promoted to full professor in the United States. Currently Sutton is a distinguished visiting professor at Parsons School of Design. She describes herself as an "activist educator and public scholar who promotes inclusivity in the cultural makeup of the city-making professions and in the populations they serve."