Sharon Patton

In 1968, she began her career as an instructor for the art department at Mankato State College in Minnesota where she taught African-American art. From 1971 to 1972, she was one of the faculties at the Lake Forest College and from 1972 to 1973, served at the Virginia Commonwealth University. In 1976, she worked at the University of Houston and from 1979 to 1985, she was a professor at the University of Maryland, which in the end, led her to become the art director at Monclair State College of New Jersey by 1986.[1]

In 1987, she became a curator-in-chief of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In 1991, she relocated to the University of Michigan where she worked as an associate professor. In 1998, Patton was named an art director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum which was a department of Oberlin College. In 2003, she relocated again, this time to Washington, D.C. where she worked as a director of the National Museum of African Art, a department of Smithsonian Institution.[1]

During her life, she held 20 exhibitions, three of which were in Studio Museum.[1]

In 2020, Sharon Patton contributes in the COVID-19 pandemic by leading a clinical team at Headspace's mental health service.[2]

Her first book Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden won the Choice’s Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award. She is also an author of 1983 published Traditional Forms and Modern Africa: West African Art at the University of Maryland, a 1987 Witches, Demons and Metamorphoses, and 1990s Vincent C. Smith, Reding on a Blue Note.[1]