Via PR

Congratulations to Ebony G. Patterson on the prestigious honor of being selected as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.

Twenty-two new geniuses were anointed today as the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation announced the 2024 winners of its MacArthur Fellowship, an award commonly known as the “genius grant.” Four visual artists, three performing artists, six writers and a filmmaker are among this year’s winners, who hail from 15 states and Washington, D.C. The grants, given annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are considered one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for intellectual and artistic achievement; this year’s winners also include historians, activists, scientists and social scientists. Along with bragging rights, fellows receive $800,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years, with “no strings attached” or requirements for how the money is used. The foundation says the money is given to “talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”

learn more

Read CGN's 2020 interview with Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson's expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility, through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence in 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, in order to draw the viewer closer and 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 the paradoxical 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, which raises pertinent questions about those who are not visible.   

Patterson (b.1981, Kingston, Jamaica) received an MFA degree in Printmaking and Drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University St. Louis (2006) and a BFA in painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (2004). Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia; Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts; the University of Kentucky and was the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her 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, KY (2019); and the Nasher Museum at Duke University, NC (2020). Other notable solo exhibitions include …things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting…, New York Botanical Garden, NY (2023); Hales Gallery, New York, NY (2022); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2021); Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2020); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2018); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA (2016); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (2014); Bermuda National Gallery (2012); among others. Select group exhibitions include Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage which originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023) and traveled to MFA Houston, TX (2024) and the Phillips Collection, DC (2024); Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990-Today, which originated at the MCA Chicago, IL (2023) and traveled to ICA Boston, MA (2023) and MCA San Diego, CA (2024); Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, which originated at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024) and traveled to High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2024).

Her work is in the public collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; The IndianapolisMuseum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, IN; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; 21c Museum and Foundation, Louisville, KY; among others. She has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships including the David C. Driskell Prize (2023); Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017), the United States Artist Award, Painter and Mixed Media Artist (2018) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant (2015). Patterson lives and works between Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, IL.