Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Across media, her works address themes of postcolonial space, visibility and invisibility, regeneration and mourning.
In early works, such as the “Gangstas for Life” series (initiated in 2008), Patterson explores ostentatious adornment—“bling”—as a strategy employed by working-class people to attain visibility. She establishes dress as a tool of empowerment for those thought to be socially and economically powerless in postcolonial spaces. Patterson incorporates hand-cut paper, gouache, glitter, and mixed media elements in these works, giving them a tactility that encourages viewers to linger over their surfaces and establishes an intimacy between viewer and subjects. Patterson has continued to expand the range of tactile elements in her work, including fabrics, tapestries, beads, fashion jewelry, trims, notions, photography, and found objects. In more recent works, Patterson employs the garden as a site of power to examine loss in the context of the colonial past and to imagine a restorative future. For a 2018 survey exhibition, “…and while the dew is still on the roses…”, Patterson created an immersive “night garden” environment to present works she created in the previous decade. The visual splendor of the installation demands close attention and prompts viewers to engage with the social histories she addresses in the earlier works also on display.
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For Patterson, the garden is an embellishment on the land concealing what we have chosen to neglect. In a 2023 exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens, “…things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting….”, she interspersed hundreds of glitter-encrusted vulture forms amid the plantings on the conservatory lawn. Patterson presents the vultures as both scavengers and caretakers, underscoring the idea that gardens are sites of regeneration. Inside the conservatory, recreations of extinct plants in cast glass evoke a ghostly past. Here, the garden is a grave as well as a site for witnessing and sitting with both beauty and the systemic ugliness our actions can cause. Beyond her own artistic practice, Patterson is a co-curator of the 2024 Prospect New Orleans Triennial and the first artist to hold that position in the triennial’s history. Through multimedia works that shimmer, Patterson shines a light in places she will not allow us to look away from.
Biography
Ebony G. Patterson received a BFA (2004) from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and an MFA (2006) from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College, the University of Kentucky, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the National Gallery of Jamaica, Alice Yard (Trinidad), the National Gallery of Bermuda, the New York Botanical Garden, The Museum of Art and Design, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), among others.
