Artworks

Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works between Kingston and Chicago, IL) has an expansive practice that addresses themes of visibility and invisibility through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry, and acts of violence within the context of "postcolonial" spaces. With the strong sensibility of a painter, Patterson works across multiple media—including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and installation—united by her consistent visual language and intention. Each work is intricately embellished and densely layered to draw the viewer closer and prompt them to question how we engage in the act of looking. Patterson states: "I aim to elevate those who have been deemed invisible/un-visible as a result of inherited colonial social structures, by incorporating their words, thoughts, dress, and pageantry as a tactic to memorialize them. It is a way to say: I am here, and you cannot deny me." Entrancing and colorful, Patterson's works command the viewer to look beyond their rich formal characteristics and to acknowledge the realities of social injustice. Using paradoxes to convey important messages, she draws on far-reaching vernaculars of art history, religious imagery, and popular culture. Patterson explains that she uses beauty to trap the viewer "physically, psychologically, and emotionally" in intricate and seducing compositions. Shrouding figures almost completely, the artist creates a presence of bodies no longer there, raising pertinent questions about those who are not visible.

Since 2013, the idea of the garden, both real and imagined, has formed an essential arc of Patterson's practice. Framing the garden as an active site of power, Patterson explores it as a metaphor for "postcolonial" space and an extension of the body. "I am interested in how gardens—natural but cultivated settings—operate with social demarcations. I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death." (Patterson, 2018). In new works, Patterson continues to deftly combine splendor with danger. Juxtaposing visibility and invisibility, death and survival, Patterson's works remain filled with an overwhelming sense of hope. People are memorialized in Patterson's gardens—each piece is a marker for bodies overlooked. Life fervently continues, and those who live in the garden persist in finding ways to survive.

Patterson earned her BFA in painting from Edna Manley College in Kingston and an MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at several institutions, including the University of Virginia, University of Kentucky, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Patterson's major survey exhibition, ...while the dew is still on the roses..., opened at Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2018 and toured to the Speed Art Museum (2019) and the Nasher Museum at Duke University (2020). Other solo exhibitions have been held at institutions like the New York Botanical Garden (2023), Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2018), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016), and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016), among others.

She has also participated in several significant group exhibitions, including Project a Black Planet at the Art Institute of Chicago (2025), Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990-Today, which originated at the MCA Chicago (2023) and traveled to ICA Boston (2023), Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage (2023–24), which traveled to venues such as MFA Houston and the Phillips Collection, and recently in Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024).

Her work is included in prominent collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. She has also received multiple awards, including the David C. Driskell Prize (2023) and the United States Artist Award (2018). Patterson currently divides her time between Kingston, Jamaica, and Chicago, IL. She has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the David C. Driskell Prize (2023), Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017), United States Artist Award, Painter and Mixed Media Artist (2018), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant (2015).