Ebony G. Patterson’s Colorful Light & Darkness

Detail for “Studies for a vocabulary of loss XXV” (2024)
Credit: Mikhail Mishin © Ebony G. Patterson

Jamaican-American artist Ebony G. Patterson does not come across as shy. Her multimedia creations are explosions of color, glitter and light — all with an undercurrent of death, decay and mourning. Patterson’s work recently vaulted into the public consciousness when she received a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant,” on October 1, 2024.

Credit: moniquemeloche.com

“For me, glitter is light. Bling is light,” she said in a recent MacArthur Foundation video. “It becomes a way of creating a mode of illumination. It has a lot to do with pageantry, visibility, death, mourning, celebration, regeneration.”

In her multi-year series, titled “Studies for a vocabulary of loss,” Patterson weaves watercolor and construction paper together with plastic insects, feathered butterflies, and words like “affliction,” “blot out” and “forgetting.”

“Each piece evokes the imagery of memorial wreaths but with text that diverges from traditional funeral associations,” Patterson’s Chicago-based gallery, Monique Meloche, said in a statement, according to This is Colossal. “Patterson asks us to grapple with the impossibility of loss, reflecting on an extensive vocabulary centered on words like calamity, forgetting, perdition, misery, wound, lack, failure, blot out, debt, hurt, undoing and havoc.”

“Studies for a vocabulary of loss III” (2022)
Credit: Monique Meloche Gallery

Patterson commonly explores themes of death and regeneration, and the manner in which beauty entwines with grief. Many of her paintings and multimedia creations incorporate flowers and butterflies, as she views the garden as a metaphor for, or an extension of, the body. “I am interested in how gardens — natural but cultivated settings — operate with social demarcations,” she said in her bio for the Monique Meloche Gallery. “I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land and death.”

Detail of “…buried again to carry on growing”
Credit: ebonygpatterson.com

In her 2023 installation at the New York Botanical Garden, titled “…things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting…,” Patterson placed hundreds of glittering, purple-black vultures amid the explosive displays of colorful flowers, drawing attention to the natural cycles of life and death — as well as how easily they can be overlooked.

Credit: New York Botanical Garden

Patterson, who divides her time between Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, Illinois, uses her work to draw viewers in closer, asking them to reconsider what they see. Listen to Patterson discuss her artistic vision in this brief video from the MacArthur Foundation below.