The Visiting Artists Program resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in the classroom in preparation for the event, research, or post-lecture discussion.
Ebony G. Patterson: Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor
Tuesday, October 27, 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. CT
Click here to join via Zoom, Passcode: SAICVAP (closed captions available)
Join us live for a virtual lecture by artist Ebony G. Patterson followed by an audience Q&A.
Ebony G. Patterson’s multilayered practice—in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video—uses beauty as a tool to address global, social, and political injustices. Most known for her large-scale tapestries and works on paper, each of her pieces begins with an elaborate photoshoot in the artist’s studio. For this, Patterson invites locals from her Kingston neighborhood to pose in opulent sets with specially designed props and costumes that reference pageantry, bringing the everyday to a hyperreal level in a carnivalesque gesture. The subsequent image is then printed on heavy paper or hand-woven jacquard, which Patterson manipulates, embellishes, and reshapes into an almost sculptural composition in which the figures are at once revealed and concealed. This visual fracturing reflects the dissonance at the heart of Patterson’s practice. While the bright, effusive visual cues on the surface of her work suggest vivifying celebration, these signifiers point to the opposite. Patterson seduces the viewer into acknowledging a darker truth lurking ominously beneath the surface. Upon closer inspection, the figures in these embellished paper works are disembodied, un-whole. Their ghostly forms hover amidst a tangle of flora and fauna, plants which themselves might harbor a secret poison. These are gardens memorializing the anonymous, innocent victims of social injustice around the world. Here, bodies are buried and souls are set free.
Patterson received her BFA from Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica and an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has had solo exhibitions and projects at many US institutions, including Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. Dead Treez, Patterson’s first large-scale institutional solo show, originated at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2015) and traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2015); Boston University Art Galleries (2016); and UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, New York (2017). Patterson’s work was included in Open Spaces Kansas City (2018), 32nd São Paulo Biennial: Live Uncertainty (2016); 12th Havana Biennial: Between the Idea and the Experience, Cuba (2015); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans (2014); and the Jamaica Biennial (2014), National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. Her first major survey exhibition …while the dew is still on the roses… opened at Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2018, then toured to Speed Art Museum, Louisville in 2019 and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina in 2020.
Established in 2006 by a generous gift from Bill and Stephanie Sick, this distinguished visiting professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC.
Image credit: Ebony G. Patterson. Photo by Daniel Moody. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Ebony Patterson’s Website
http://ebonygpatterson.com/
Gallery Representation
http://moniquemeloche.com/artists/ebony-g-patterson/
Ebony G. Patterson: The Interactivity of Visual Appeal
Alison Reilly | Chicago Gallery News | May 14, 2020
Ebony G. Patterson Drenches the Nasher in Mourning Glory
Jameela F. Dallis | Indy Week | February 26, 2020
Ebony G. Patterson: ...to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil?
Amber Officer-Narvasa | The Brooklyn Rail | December 20, 2019
Ebony G. Patterson on dress and dignity in ...three kings weep…
Lauren O’Neill-Butler and Ebony Patterson | Artforum | October 4, 2019
Ebony G. Patterson: new garden-inspired installations reveal an original thinker in full bloom
Victoria Stapley–Brown | The Art Newspaper | December 8, 2018
Ebony G. Patterson’s Dark, Whimsical Garden of Poisonous Plants and Glass Body Parts
Osman Can Yerebakan | Vulture | November 26, 2018
Ebony Patterson Searches for the Lives of the Unknown Dead in a Jamaica Massacre
Sarah Rose Sharp | Hyperallergic | January 24, 2018
Ebony G. Patterson by 
Prospect. 4 by 
Relational Undercurrents by Ebony G. Patterson: …when the cuts erupt…the garden rings…and the warning is a wailing… : September 11, 2020 – February 21, 2021
Ebony G. Patterson...while the dew is still on the roses… : February 27 – July 12, 2020
Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez : November 10 – April 3, 2017
Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.
SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977-98).