CHICAGO: Ebony G. Patterson

unearthing treez

September 12- October 24, 2015

MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY

2154 West Division Street

Chicago, IL

In her third solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Ebony G. Patterson will debut a new body of her signature hand-embellished tapestries that are part of the ongoing series Dead Treez.  Focusing on the body to impart the paradoxical relationship between Jamaica’s traditional expectations of manhood and the flamboyant aesthetics of its dancehall culture, Patterson creates a window onto working-class Jamaican society. Adorned with patterning and ornamentation, the artist seduces the viewer into bearing witness to the underreported and unacknowledged brutality experienced by those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.  Gone are the party people glittering in the video light, these new tapestries hold images of murder victims, drawing attention to shadowy and more violent aspects of the pageantry.

Click here to for exhibit info and images.

COVER: Ebony G. Patterson / Frieze / April 2014

Island Life

Art in the Caribbean

Comprising 700 islands, 13 states and 17 dependent territories, and hosting a range of languages including Creole, Dutch, English, French and Spanish, the Caribbean represents a rich and complex set of cultures and histories. Dan Fox asks six artists, curators and writers to reflect on how questions of identity, infrastructure and education shape art in the region today.

Quotes: 

 “The idea that anything intellectual happens in The Bahamas is anathema to the brand we have projected to the outside world.”

Amanda Coulson, Director, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau

“It is getting increasingly difficult to draw a border around what is Jamaican art – as is also the case in the rest of the Caribbean.”

Charles Campbell, artist, writer and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica

“Within the region, the contemporary visual arts are battling a legacy of being underdeveloped and underappreciated. There is not an economy of understanding concerning the development of contemporary art, and its evolution has not been supported in practical ways by local governments and federations.”

Holly Bynoe, artist, curator, writer and Director and Editor-in-Chief of ARC magazine

“Artists in the region are functioning in an arena with a relatively small audience, very limited primary art markets and, in many cases, non-existent secondary markets for contemporary practice. One challenge this poses is that much of the work is appreciated and valued outside of the region, creating a gap between the makers and their homegrown audiences.” 

Annalee Davis, artist and Founding Director of the Fresh Milk Art Platform, Inc.

“This question of identity often presents itself to Caribbean art. Artists either seem to address it directly or are determined to avoid it – both of which accentuate the enormity of the issue.”

John Cox, artist, curator, teacher, Creative Art Director of Baha Mar Ltd., and founder of Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts

“There are very few independent platforms, galleries or project rooms. The few that do exist are run by artists, with no specific curatorial or commercial strategy.”

Caryl Ivrisse-Crochemar, founder of espace d’art contemporain 14ºN 61ºW, Martinique, French West Indies

To read complete story and view images pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of Frieze magazine on newsstands now or read online here.

OVERLAND PARK: Ebony G. Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson, Brella Krew from the Fambily series (detail), 2013, Triptych, mixed media, hand embellished photo tapestries, 78 x 285", Collection Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum, Louisville, KY. Image via gardneredge.com.

dy/nas/ty

March 7 – June 15, 2014

NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Johnson County Community College

12345 College Boulevard

Overland Park, KS

Jamaican-born artist's first US institution solo show!

Press Release by Bruce Hartmann, executive director, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art:

Ebony G. Patterson’s previous monumental mug-shot portraits have evolved into complex groupings of figures as she furthers her exploration of the appropriation and interpretation of feminine archetypes by young men of the African diaspora. Aspects of the feminine, fashion, pattern, decoration and pastiche proliferate in her large-scale, mixed media works and elaborate installations. Her Nerman Museum show – an encompassing installation – will be her first one-person exhibition at an American museum.

Patterson states, “The work explores ideas about masculinity and how the masculine is constructed, particularly in popular culture, using the dancehall space, Jamaican popular culture, as the platform for the conversation. Dancehall space has always been an incredibly macho space … to see the feminine superimposed on the masculine canvas, or the masculine slate, begins to change these understandings. It raises questions about what is now understood as masculine.”

Her monumental tapestries – encrusted with glitter, rhinestones, fabric silk flowers, jewelry, sunglasses, etc. – are both vibrant and inescapable – and grounded in the subcultures of Kingston, Jamaica’s dancehall happenings. Flamboyant and visually assertive, her works investigate shifting and contradictory roles in Jamaican dancehall culture. She explores contemporary notions of fashion and masculine beauty, considering practices like skin bleaching, meticulous grooming and riotously patterned attire – all common within dancehall culture.

Patterson’s Fambily series explores the gang as a way to re-envision family and to examine the complicated relations between men in the gang. “The Fambily series, in particular, also explores the gang structure and looks at gang hierarchy. Gang space is also another kind of space where men learn to assert themselves in the macho and is also a space where they want you to understand a certain kind of masculinity,” explains Patterson.

Patterson did her undergraduate work at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and earned her master's of fine arts in 2006 from the Sam Fox College of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University, St. Louis. Her works have been featured in numerous exhibitions including Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, Perez Art Museum, Miami, El Museo De Barrio, Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; eMERGING: Visual Art and Music in a Post-Hip-Hop era, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn, NY; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago and will be included in the upcoming 2015 Havana Biennale, Havana, Cuba. Patterson is an assistant professor in the painting department at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Exhibit Link

CHICAGO: Ebony G. Patterson

…until you see them

November 14, 2013 – January 4, 2014

Opening reception:  Thursday, November 14, 2013, 6-8pm

moniquemeloche

2154 West Division Street

Chicago, IL

For her second solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Ebony G. Patterson presents ...until you see them, a series of new, large-scale, mixed-media works on paper. Patterson's signature, monumental mug-shot portraits have grown into complex groupings of full figures as she expands her exploration into the varied interpretation and appropriation of feminine archetypes by young men of the African diaspora. In this expansion, Patterson introduces the female figure to address modes of visibility and invisibility within a certain cultural code. Notions of the feminine, fashion, pattern, decoration and pastiche grow in ...until you seem them, as Patterson explores a new forest of figuration.

Following her opening at moniquemeloche, Patterson will participate in a week long workshop at Theaster Gates' new Arts Incubator in Washington Park, Nov. 15-21, with Patterson in dialogue with Krista A. Thompson, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art History, Northwestern University and Allison Glenn, Arts Incubator + Public Life Program Manager and Exhibitions Curator, on Thursday, November 21st from 6-7:30 PM. For further information visit Arts Incubator here. 

Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaican, born Kingston, 1981, works Lexington, KY) is the recipient of many prestigious fellowships, awards and grants, including Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica (2012), The Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2012), and Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies (2011).   Recent exhibitions include Six Degrees of Separate Nations, Frost Art Museum, Miami, eMERGING: Visual Art and Music in a Post-Hip-Hop Era, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), Brooklyn, Aruba Biennial: Happy Islands, Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, and Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, The Studio Museum in Harlem, co-organized with El Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum of Art, New York.

In 2014, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, will travel to the Perez Art Museum Miami and Patterson's work will be included in Disguise: Hidden Dimensions in African past, present and future art at the Seattle Art Museum and European Masters and Creativity in Caribbean Fine Arts at the Frost Art Museum, Miami.   Patterson was recently lauded as "30 Black Artists Under 40" by The Huffington Post and "25 Artists to Watch and Collect" by ArtVoicesMagazine.com and graced the cover of the International Review of African American Art, Vol. 24, No. 3.  Patterson is Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.    

COVER: Ebony G. Patterson / The International Review of African American Art / Volume 24, Number 3A / 2013

Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled Species IV (Bazile Paw), 2011, mixed media on paper, 63 x 50 inches.
Image appears on IRAAA courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Triple Consciousness, Diasporic Art in American Context

Guest editor: Cinque Hicks

From IRAAA web site:

This year marks the 50th year since the death of WEB Du Bois whose application of the notion of "double consciousness" continues to inform discussions of African American identity. In 2013, the notion is arguably further complicated by virtue of living in a globally connected world in which national identities take on more complex hues. How might Du Bois's idea be updated and remixed for the 21st century to include artists whose work addresses the curious place of working or living in the US, but from elsewhere in the Diaspora? How is work addressing the thorny idea of "triple consciousness"?

Excerpt from ‘Ebony Patterson: Dancehall’s Body Politic’ by Jamillah James:

What differentiates Patterson’s practice from the vanguard is her direct engagement with class at the street level and her interest in self-presentation in the face of adversity within Jamaican culture. Born and raised in Kingston, she is very much engaged in the dancehall culture, not just out of sheer enjoyment, but as fodder for her own artistic practice. There is something seductively casual about Patterson’s work, which affords it an accessibility evading the works of artists such as those who worked in the 1980s and 1990s making art dealing with identity.

Features include:

Destination Venice: Curator Yacouba Konatée on Côte d’Ivoire’s Biennale Debut by Cinque Hicks

The Harmful Consequences of Postblack by Eddie Chambers

Akosua Adoma Owusu: Exploring “Threeness” by Erica Agyenow

Paul Anthony Smith: Identity Inside Out by Jody B. Cutter

Art reviews include:

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC)

Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: Israel (Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA)

Loïs Mailou Jones: Works from Every Stage of the Pioneering Black Woman Artist’s Career (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA)

David Hartt: Stray Light (Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC)

Kara Walker: Rise Up, Ye Mighty Race! (Art Institute of Chicago)

Issue also features a portfolio of works from María Magadelena Campos-Pons and an artist project by emerging photographer Rosine Kouamen, who meditates on the relationship between three discrete identities: African, American and African-American.

Order the current issue, back issues and subscriptions at the IRAAA online store: iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu/store.

NEW YORK: Bigger Than Shadows

Rico Gatson, Untitled (Nat Turner), 2011. Image via Dodge-Gallery.com.

Curated by Rich Blint and Ian Cofre

November 10 - December 22, 2012

Opening Reception: November 10, 2012, 6-8pm

DODGEgallery

15 Rivington Street

New York,  NY

Bigger Than Shadows is a group exhibition that explores recent work on the black male body that refashions, riffs on, or re-inflects dominant constructions about the figure known as the black male. Black maleness conjures a host of contradictory associations in the American imagination—from questions about historical morality, creative virtuosity, inherent pathology, to notions of outsized masculinity and, paradoxically, the very absence of masculine authority. Bigger Than Shadows aims to clear space for a timely exchange among emerging and established artists about contemporary and future-oriented visual re-presentations of racialized corporeality—of the black male body in the flesh. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, Noah Davis, Rico Gatson, Adler Guerrier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Duron Jackson, Jayson Keeling, Yashua Klos, Deana Lawson, Kambui Olujimi, Ebony G. Patterson, Robert Pruitt, Jacolby Satterwhite and Zachary Fabri.

Duron Jackson will present a new sculpture titled Bones Crusade, 2012, which expands on his previous work on incarceration, surveillance, and the influence and distortionary effects of these systems. Other sculptural works by Rico Gatson and Adler Guerrier draw from multiple references, engaging the urban landscape and its impression on the body through abstractions of language and perception.

The revelatory photographic contributions from Lyle Ashton Harris, Jayson Keeling, and Deana Lawson are documents of subjects that defy immediate categorization. Harris's and Lawson's examinations of Southern subcultures join Keeling, who is working with a bust of his own face cast by John Ahearn, rephotographing the sculpture to draw attention to subtleties of form through distance.

Yashua Klos's constructions are both fragile and monumental, negotiating aspects of identity through fragmentation, collage, and camouflage. Similarly reconstructed, an array of visual styles will be on display including a contribution from The Human Structure Series (2011) by Derrick Adams, an example of Ebony Patterson's Species Series (2011), a new, large-scale drawing by Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, a quiet and ambiguous figurative painting by Los Angeles-based Noah Davis, new work by Kambui Olujimi, and a virtual, Hieronymus Bosch-esque video tableau titled Country Ball, 1989-2012, by Jacolby Satterwhite that is built from memory rather than morality.

Rich Blint earned his Ph.D. in the Program in American Studies at New York University. His areas of specialty include African-American literature and culture; the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean; as well as racial visuality, media studies, and U.S. popular culture. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (forthcoming Winter 2013); guest editor of the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of Black Renaissance Noir, a journal of pan-African culture and politics; and has written critically about the work of Wangechi Mutu and Deana Lawson. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the C.L.R. James Institute, Rich has taught courses and guest lectured at New York University, Columbia University School of Law, Vassar College, and the Brecht Forum. He serves on the Executive Board of Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora and is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Ian Cofre, a graduate of Columbia University, is an independent curator working primarily with emerging artists. Frequently collaborating with Omar Lopez-Chahoud, recent projects include co-writing "The Art Fair Effect," an essay for the Bronx Museum's Taking AIM!The Business of Being an Artist Today (2011) and co-curating the exhibitions Tracing the Unseen Border (2011) at La MaMa La Galleria and Southern Exposure (2009) at Dumbo Arts Center. Other shows include Behind Closed Doors (2011), a curated solo project by Manuela Viera-Gallo at Y Gallery and The Doubtful Guest (2010) at Kill Devil Hill in Greenpoint, NY. He most recently served as Director of the now-closed Sue Scott Gallery and Studio Manager for Mickalene Thomas before that.

Exhibit Link

FIVE: Ebony G. Patterson

“FIVE” is a newly added question and answer feature at BlackArtistNews where five questions are posed to an individual artist, curator, gallerist, collector or art lover. Why five questions? Well, there are five fingers on each hand and artists create with their hands hence one, two, three, four, FIVE. 



Ebony G. Patterson. Photo by Quam Odunsi/Reserved Result (RR). All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Buzz-worthy terms like “next”, “one to watch” and “rising art star” have lined the career path of emerging artist Ebony G. Patterson. And given her rapid trajectory she could easily be dubbed the “Usain Bolt of the Art World.” And rightly so: She displays the same steadfast and confident commitment to her practice that her fellow Jamaican does to his track-and-field pursuits. Patterson definitely earns a gold medal for her first Chicago solo exhibition, on view until March 26th at moniquemeloche where BlackArtistNews caught up with the very busy yet extremely gracious artist: 

What is your earliest memory of making art?

My parents teaching me how to draw. My mommy taught me how to draw people, my daddy taught me how to draw birds.


Is your process solitary or do you work with assistants?

Both. My installations involve a lot of people particularly the photo-based installations: The use of models, photographers, and an assistant help me bring it all together. But my drawings and my paintings are [done solitarily]. I enjoy the wide experiences of both.


You're a Jamaican woman who teaches in Lexington, KY. How are you able to break through culture barriers and inspire your students?

Well, I am very close in age to my students so relating on some level is not too difficult. I share my experiences with my students and I encourage them to do the same with me. I never let them feel that I am the only one who has lessons to offer; I believe teaching happens both ways: teacher-to-student, student-to-teacher.


How important is it for an artist to be able to articulate one's work?

Extremely. It's just another way of thinking. If you made it you should be able to articulate it!


Does art matter?

Of course it does! [That’s like asking] “does food matter”? 

Installation view of Ebony G. Patterson at moniquemeloche, Chicago:

View more works by Ebony G. Patterson at:

http://moniquemeloche.com/ebony-g-patterson/

http://seelinegallery.com/patterson.html

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100808/arts/arts1.html

http://nationalgalleryofjamaica.wordpress.com/tag/ebony-g-patterson/

http://www.lipsticktracez.com/features/feature/103/1