Sonia Almeida

Artist Sonia Almeida speaks about her recent paintings and book projects with art historian Gloria Sutton. In her vibrantly-hued works, Almeida uses non-traditional painting materials including plywood, hinges, and LED lights, while also drawing on techniques of printmaking and the history of textiles. Together Almeida and Sutton discuss how meaning becomes encoded within the works and the translation of visual language across mediums.

This program is presented in collaboration with VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) and their public programs series VoCA Talks, which features artists and their collaborators in conversation about the challenges and rewards inherent in making, showing, and preserving contemporary art.

Free and open to the public; registration is requested. RSVP

Sonia Almeida

Sonia Almeida is an artist working in Boston and a Fine Arts lecturer at Brandeis University. A through-line in her practice is the artist’s investigation into the ways that language is learned, shared, and adapted through processes of fragmentation and multiplicity. The duality of meaning, communication on the verge of breakdown, resuscitated through context, and the continual effort of interpretation serve as entry points on how to approach her work. Almeida received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and BFA from the University of Lisbon. She is a recipient of the 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Almeida is represented by Simone Subal Gallery in NYC and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including among others at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the ICA, Boston, the Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal, Chiado 8- Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal, DeCordova Sculpture Park, the  Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and The Institute of Contemporary Art at MICA, Portland ME.

Gloria Sutton

Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University and a research affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at MIT. She is author of The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome and Expanded Cinema published by MIT Press. She received her doctorate from the University of California Los Angeles and has been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute. She has contributed to numerous international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs and lectures widely on contemporary art. Sutton is currently at work on the book, Pattern Recognition: Durational Conditions of Contemporary Art, which provides a critical analysis of the rise of network culture within visual art.