297.2 x 345.4 cm
Notes:
9.75 x 11.3 feet
Garden Breakdown
By Stuart Horodner
Director of University of Kentucky Art Museum
If you see something, say something.
I have seen Ebony G. Patterson’s art up close for the past four years, watching her painting practice stride into the “expanded field” with confidence. Everything that can add referential precision is allowed in, and the stuff of sculpture heads towards installation and increasingly, site specificity. Ebony gathers playful and potent images along with a cornucopia of readymade materials to perform a big-hearted seduction of the viewer. Embedded in her opulent affability is a dead serious need for consciousness-raising
We first met on the campus of the University of Kentucky, where Ebony was a faculty member for eleven years. She was on the search committee that eventually suggested hiring me to become the fifth director of the UK Art Museum. Soon after my arrival in summer, she invited me to see several works that were about to be shipped out for an exhibition. They were arranged in a large common area, hanging against bumpy sheetrock walls. I had not seen these tapestry-like hangings before. I peered at and into them; simultaneously figurative and ornamental, like sporting camouflage at the carnival.
I remember asking Ebony if anyone had contextualized her among the artists of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement. Her answer was no. I was thinking about several men and women who had been championed by dealer Holly Solomon; and other practitioners whose art indulged in indulgence and reveled in a visual robustness that countered the ascetic clarity of Minimalism. This was the first time I had seen crinkled cellophane, wild wallpaper, beads, and embroidery in Manhattan galleries. I rattled off a list including Cynthia Carlson, Kim MacConnel, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Miriam Schapiro, Ned Smyth, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and Robert Zakanitch.
It is always tricky to discuss precedents and peers with an artist. It can feel invalidating to them, rather than expansive. We spoke of these “feminists with fabric” and “men who sew” for a short while. I don’t recall us talking much about Radcliffe Bailey, Sanford Biggers, Mickalene Thomas, or Kehinde Wiley, either; although Ebony has exhibited with some of these artists. I just looked and became familiar with her chief concerns and procedural strategies.
In 2015, I included Ebony in “Bottoms Up: A Sculpture Survey,” a large intergenerational group show at our museum. We presented five decorated and elevated child-sized coffins from her Invisible Presence: Bling Memories series. They occupied the corner with a mournful ascendency, installed near Stephen, a wall-mounted plaster head and torso by John Ahearn, and Willie Cole’s Shoonufu Female Figure, his trompe l’oeil cast bronze that reclaims the power of African art and fashionable footwear while throwing shade at Picasso. Nearby on the floor sat a Felix Gonzalez-Torres endless stack of grainy black and white posters, featuring a lone bird flying in a cloudy sky.
As two significant career markers have just opened - an extensive exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Ebony’s fourth solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery - I cannot help but think about the command that she brings to her current productions. New works continue to include meticulously staged photographs of black and brown bodies that are turned into printed tapestries by a commercial weaver, but they have become almost entirely undone by acts of dismemberment and adornment. The cropping and cutting of figures has deposited arms and legs across the lush landscape. Headless matriarchs bend to search for missing children, their own bodies festooned with strands of ribbon and glass pearls, the same items that map the contours of specific flora. Bling attracts, watchful birds perch, and colorful vines cascade over the topography like uncontrollable tears.
Ebony’s titles are apt, using the refrain “for those who bear/bare witness” in combination with beginning lines including, “they couldn’t unsee,” “they wondered what to do,” and “she saw things she shouldn’t have,” among others. These are like hashtags that speak of a steady stream of horrible acts and subsequent traumas. The artist will not look away and insists that we don’t either.
As I write this last line, my mind wanders to Leon Golub, my mentor and a native son of
Chicago. His intelligent anger as artist/activist produced numerous works that pictured brutalized bodies that were the result of officially sanctioned violence and various abuses of power. In the mid-1980s, Golub’s unstretched canvases were animated by sedentary black men who regard each other and us with suspicious stares. A few paintings in this period are titled Threnody, and depict standing women performing songs or poems of mourning. His two series, We Can Disappear You and This Could Be You, both made in the aftermath of 9/11, collapse the space between observer and potential victim.
These conditions can be found in abundance in Ebony G. Patterson’s meditations on disenfranchised communities and vulnerable citizens, be it in her native Jamaica or locations around the globe. Her elaborate works speak to the significance of witnessing and the condemnation of brutalities both large and small. In her gardens, beauty and hope mingle with uncertainty and decay, and we must find an empathetic space in which to stand.
