Sonia Landy Sheridan

Sonia Landy Sheridan was born in 1925 in Newark, Ohio. She studied painting and printmaking at Ohio State University, earning a BFA in 1949, and completed an MFA at the University of Illinois in 1951. She later pursued further studies at Columbia University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1960s she began teaching at the School of the Art Institute, where she founded the Generative Systems program in 1970. The program became a leading site for experimentation, giving students access to emerging technologies and fostering collaboration between artists, scientists, and engineers. In 1973 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts.

Sheridan’s practice examined the potential of imaging machines at the moment they first entered everyday life. As artist-in-residence at the 3M Company, she worked with the Color-in-Color copier, one of the first commercial color copy machines, producing works that combined scientific experiment with personal imagery drawn from flowers, food, and daily objects. She described her process as asking machines questions, treating them as partners in discovery. Her work with 3M technologies fed directly into Generative Systems, where students were encouraged to test the same tools with equal freedom. Even before this, in the late 1960s, she used Xerox technology to produce antiwar protest banners, underscoring the quiet but determined rebellion that marked her approach. In 1976 she published Artist in the Science Lab, a reflection on her residency at 3M and on her methods of working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Across these projects, Sheridan emphasized access over exclusivity, regarding universities and laboratories as the true sites of artistic freedom rather than the gallery system.

She was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1980, and her work was included in Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983 and Ars Electronica in Linz in 1984, situating her at the forefront of international dialogues on art and technology. Later survey exhibitions such as Ex Machina: Frühe Computerkunst bis 1979 at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 2007 and bit international at ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2008 further recognized her role as a pioneer in new media. In the United States, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College presented the retrospective The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan in 2009, followed by In Residence: Contemporary Art at Dartmouth in 2014. Her first European solo exhibition was organized at transmediale in Berlin in 2013, curated by Jacob Lillemose. Sheridan’s exhibition history reflects her choice to remain outside the commercial gallery system, working instead within the freedom of universities and research institutions. There she had access to tools, scientists, and students, and could build programs like Generative Systems that embodied her democratic and experimental approach. This independence allowed her to shape a career on her own terms, centered on discovery rather than market visibility. Sheridan passed away in 2021.