The full title of this article by Benjamin Sutton (The Art Newspaper) is “Artists Tony Cokes, Ebony G. Patterson and Wendy Red Star among winners of 2024 MacArthur ‘genius grants.’” Sutton writes that “each MacArthur fellow receives $800,000 in unrestricted funds, making it one of the most important prizes available to artists.” Read full article at The Art Newspaper and see more information on Patterson, from the MacArthur Foundation, below. Our warm congratulations to Ebony G. Patterson!
The 22 recipients of the 2024 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, revealed by the MacArthur Foundation on Tuesday (1 October), include several visual artists: the Rhode Island-based media artist Tony Cokes; the multimedia and installation artist Ebony G. Patterson, who splits her time between Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica; and the Portland, Oregon-based Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star. Justin Vivian Bond, an influential performance artist whose practice incorporates video, painting, installation and more, is also among this year’s winners of the so-called MacArthur “genius grants”, each of which comes with an unrestricted $800,000 cash prize.
As is the case every year, the cohort of MacArthur Fellowship recipients for 2024 covers a large range of disciplines, from artists to poets, historians, choreographers, evolutionary biologists, an oceanographer, an astronomer and more. This year’s fellows also include the Seminole/Muscogee writer and film-maker Sterlin Harjo, whose films include the artist documentary Love and Fury (2020) and who co-created the series Reservation Dogs (2021-23). [. . .]
Patterson’s work spans elaborate wall-based assemblages using collaged paper, glitter, gouache painting and more, as well as large installations with sculptural elements that often reflect on violence against people of colour both in her native Jamaica and in the US. This year, Patterson is co-curating the sixth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial (with Miranda Lash), opening on 2 November. [. . .]
Last year’s MacArthur Fellows included the visual artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard and Dyani White Hawk. [. . .]
About Ebony’s Work
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.
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.
For more information, see https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2024/ebony-g-patterson
For full article by B. Sutton, see https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/10/01/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows-tony-cokes-ebony-patterson-wendy-red-star