Ebony G. Patterson

A JAMAICAN GOLD MINE

EBONY G. Patterson is a Jamaican visual artist, that has arguably put the contemporary art from Jamaica on the international map.

Her international career to date is unprecedented for an artist from Jamaica and, in the world of art, it represents an exciting counterpart to the achievements of our top athletes in the world of sports, achievements which are much far better known and more readily recognised.

Her achievements have also helped to open doors for other young and emerging artists from Jamaica to attract the international spotlight to contemporary art in the Caribbean

Patterson studied painting at Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts. She received a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia and is a former tenured Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky.

Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Jamaica, the United States, and in other countries.

While still a student she gained attention for her bold paintings that focused on female genitalia. Patterson’s work revolves around questions of identity and the body, and takes the form of mixed media paintings, drawings and collages, most of them on paper.

Photography, found objects, installation and performance have recently become increasingly important in her practice.

Since 2002 she has participated in several shows including Taboo and other small group exhibitions that she curated.

In 2016, Patterson’s solo show at the Museum of Arts and Design, Dead Treez, incorporated several appliquéd commercially-woven Jacquard weavings in which she used restaged images of photographs that had been taken of murder victims in Jamaica and then circulated on social media.

The exhibition also included a collection of mannequins in vibrant Jamaican dance hall wear titled Swag SwagKrew, and a series of vitrines with artificial flora and jewellery belonging to the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design and in which patterned bodies again referencing the victims of violent crime.

One of Patterson’s most recognized body of work is a series entitled ‘Gangstas for Life,’ which explores conceptions of masculinity within Dancehall culture. In this series, she specifically explores skin bleaching as a means of marking and transformation, not as an act of racial self-loathing.

Additionally, the series examined the dichotomy between Jamaican stereotypical ideologies of homosexual practices and its parallels within dancehall culture

She has been the recipient of several awards. In 2006 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Youth Awards for Excellence in Arts and Culture, the highest award that a young person can receive in this field in Jamaica.

In

2016, she also was commissioned to do an installation, titled … PRESENT for Barneys’ Christmas windows in New York City.

In 2018, she received three major awards, the 2017 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (which was announced in February 2018), as well as the prestigious United States Artists Award and the Stone and DeMcguire Contemporary Art Award.

Heeding the advice given to her by her teacher and mentor Cecil

Cooper, Patterson has continued to work and exhibit regularly in Jamaica, where she maintains her main home.