Ebony G. Patterson is a prolific mixed-media artist whose multilayered works incorporate painting, sculpture, video, and performance. She employs vibrant colors and lavish floral motifs to seduce viewers into deeper reflections on social and political injustices. Her work, which often places disembodied figures hidden among decorative tapestries, suggests acts of violence and oppression are lurking beneath the ornamental surface.

To create the large-scale tapestries for which she is famous, Patterson conducts photoshoots with locals from her neighborhood in Kingston, Jamaica, giving them specially designed props and costumes and placing them within opulent sets. She then prints the images on heavy paper or hand-woven jacquard, manipulating and embellishing the material until the figures are buried within the opulent jewels and lavash flora and fauna.

Patterson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent art institutions, including the Perez Art Museum Miami, Speed Museum of Art, Nasher Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Art and Design NY, Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark, and most recently at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis which travelled to the ICA San Jose. She has been included in prestigious global exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennale 2021, Athens Biennale 2021, São Paulo 2016, Havana Biennia 2015, Ghetto Biennial Haiti 2009, and Jamaica Biennial 2007, 2010, 2014.

Her works also are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Art; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, among other institutions. A special installation of her work is on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University from November 2021 through spring 2022

Patterson has held teaching positions at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and was a tenured professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where she was an associate professor of painting and mixed media.

In 2018, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts recognized Patterson with the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, which helps promising WashU alumni artists advance their studio practice. She also received a United States Artists award that year, given to the most compelling artists living and working in America. She has received numerous grants that support the continuation and evolution of her work, and was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award, and the Young Alumni Award at the 2011 Sam Fox School Distinguished Alumni Awards.

Patterson earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Edna Manley College in 2004 and her Master of Fine Arts in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School in 2006.

Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Image: Frank Ishma

Ayana V. Jackson (born in 1977 in East Orange, NJ, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography and its relationship to the human body.

By using her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities. Her practice maps the ethical considerations and relationships between the photographer, subject and viewer, in turn exploring themes around race, gender and reproduction. Her work examines myths of the Black Diaspora and re-stages colonial archival images as a mean to liberate the Black body.

Her work is collected by major local and international institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem (New-York, NY), The Newark Museum (NJ), The JP Chase Morgan collection, Princeton University Art Museum (NJ), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (Australia), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, WA). Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Photography (NY), and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship (Washington D.C).

Portrait of Ayana V. Jackson. Photographed by Andile Buka. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim

Alturas Foundation selected Beth Lipman as its Artist in Residence for 2019 to develop a new direction in her chosen media, glass. Beth has devoted her residency to a project she has entitled House Album, a selective portrait of the United States that explores issues surrounding agency, identity, and memory.

The work is composed of two and three dimensional domestic objects that represent significant individuals and critical episodes in America’s history, creating an allegory of our collective home. The concept is generated from two specific traditions of defining domestic interiors: the late nineteenth century pastime of scrapbooking of miniature houses (two dimensional) and the Period Room (three dimensional), an exhibition construct utilized in museums from the early twentieth century to the present day. In both of these applications individuals aspire to create the ideal home, and by extension their perceived individual identity.

House Album was on exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in New York from Sep 24, 2020 through Nov 7, 2021 as part of Beth’s retrospective exhibition there entitled Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy.

Alturas Foundation is proud to have supported Paul Scott with a multi-year Artist in Residence grant from 2016 to 2019 to pursue his New American Scenery project.

In the early nineteenth century, blue and white ceramic “transferware” was imported into North America from England in great quantity.  Using appropriated prints from book and magazine illustration, transferware was one of the major innovative “new media” practices of the era and celebrated the newly independent and developing United States with scenes of industrial, cultural and historic significance.  With New American Scenery, Mr. Scott has reanimated this historic media to create a significant and meaningful body of new artwork which reflects and comments on contemporary America.

Paul Scott, is a material-based conceptual artist, and creates ceramic artwork that blurs the boundaries between art, craft, and design. His artwork explores the unexpected movement of images through materials, media, cultures, politics, histories, and geographies, and invites us to see these objects in a new way.  Scott is an authority on printed vitreous surfaces, and the author of Ceramics in Print, and Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, co-edited with Knut Astrup Bull.

The exhibition New American Scenery was unveiled at RISD Museum, Providence on September 13, 2019, as an installation in the Lucy Truman Aldrich Gallery, part of Raid the Icebox Now, celebrating fifty years since Andy Warhol’s original groundbreaking intervention in the museum. A digital catalogue is available here. The exhibition runs until Dec 30 2021, and thereafter will tour to other venues including an expanded version, incorporating additional historical material from the collection at Albany Institute of History & Art, August 28, 2022 to January 2, 2023. 

A British iteration of New American Scenery opened at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle in September 2020 and runs until January 9, 2022. The exhibition will then tour to Aberystwyth Arts Centre at the University of Wales from July 2022. Other New American Scenery artworks are currently on show at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool.

The accompanying slide show presents several of the contemporary transferware pieces created during the Alturas Foundation residency featured in the exhibitions.

Alturas Foundation, through its Artist in Residence program, is currently providing support for their new work in progress that will be completed in 2023.  Previously, Alturas Foundation provided support in 2010 and 2011 to Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler for the creation of the artists’ tenth video installation entitled Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011). The artwork explores the residue of cinema and social terrain around a mountain in the Chihuahua Desert near the West Texas town of Sierra Blanca.  In this installation, Hubbard / Birchler explore a possible relationship between Sierra Blanca and the Méliès brothers, two early twentieth century pioneers in commercial cinema.

Filmed on location over the course of one year, Movie Mountain (Méliès) generates several fractured narrative strands that interweave reality and memory.   The installation is presented as a two-screen projection in which the separate screens offer a reflection of the multi-layered history of Sierra Blanca.  Movie Mountain (Méliès) is Hubbard / Birchler’s second installment in their Sound Speed Marker trilogy exploring the social and physical sites of cinema.

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have been working collaboratively in video, photography and sculpture since 1990, after completing graduate degrees at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Their work invites suggestive, open-ended reflections on place and cinema and is “propelled by the artists’ fascination with the open circuits of social life, memory, and history that sit just outside the frame of moving images.”

Hubbard grew up in Australia and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, as well as the graduate sculpture program at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Birchler grew up in Switzerland and studied at the Academy of Art and Design Basel and the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. Hubbard and Birchler are Graduate Faculty members at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Hubbard holds the William and Bettye Nowlin Endowed Professorship in Photography in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Abelardo Morell was supported by an Alturas Foundation Artist in Residence grant in 2008 and 2009 to explore new directions in his art, using the camera obscura as a new way of looking at land and landscape in West Texas near Big Bend National Park.  During his residency, Morell, with his assistant, C.J. Heyliger, continued development of a light proof tent camera, which uses periscope type optics to project views of the surrounding landscape onto the surface of the ground within the tent.  (see link below)   Alturas Foundation organized and sponsored The Universe Next Door, an exhibition of Mr. Morell’s work in conjunction with the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas in 2009.

Mr. Morell is the recipient of many awards for his photography, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Decordova Museum Rappaport Prize.  Morell’s work has been collected and shown in many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad.   A major retrospective of his work was jointly organized and exhibited in 2013 and 2014 by the Art Institute of Chicago, The J. Paul Getty Museum and The High Museum, Atlanta.

After becoming acquainted with David Wiseman during his creation of “El Cielo” a private commission in 2007 and 2008, Alturas Foundation offered David Wiseman an Artist Residency in conjunction with his participation in “Intense and Fragile”, an exhibition of contemporary ceramic art at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas.

David Wiseman (b. 1981) draws upon traditions of time-honored craftsmanship and experimentation of contemporary design methods to create poetic and sculptural work spanning the spectrum of fine and decorative arts. Wiseman’s pieces offer his unique renderings of extraordinary natural phenomena, such as blossoming branches in porcelain and bronze, the tangle of a pomegranate tree’s canopy beautifully orchestrated across a ceiling, or a bird hidden in a bronze fireplace screen. By immersing himself in traditional materials and methods Wiseman’s unique aesthetic imparts his artwork with a permanence found in cherished objects of the past, purposefully employed to realize his truly original vision.

Wiseman has made site-specific installations for public institutions, international brands, private collections and his crystal was recently acquired by the Corning Museum of Glass’ permanent collection, Corning, NY.  His furnishings were named best of the best by Robb Report 2013 and his large scaled Collage Garden Gate Doors, were included in the New York Times’ top 10 list at Design Miami 2013.  Wiseman, a 2003 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), lives and works in Los Angeles.

Alturas Foundation selected Laura McPhee as its initial Artist in Residence in 2003.  Ms. McPhee worked during the subsequent two years in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, capturing images that address Americans’ conflicting ideas about landscape and land use, and our values about our relationship to the natural world.  In 2006, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, featured her Idaho work in River of No Return, an exhibition of forty 6′ X 8′ contemporary photographs from more than eighty she created during her Alturas residency.  In 2008 with Alturas Foundation support, Yale University Press published a collection of the Idaho images also entitled River of No Return, which features an introduction by U.S. poet laureate Robert Haas.  In 2013, with support from Alturas Foundation, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri exhibited twenty-eight of McPhee’s large scale photographs from River of No Return.

Laura McPhee was born in Manhattan, and grew up toward the end of a dirt road in central New Jersey.  She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design.  Her work, which ranges from portrait to landscape to still life, is widely exhibited nationally and internationally.  She is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and lives in Ketchum, Idaho.  Ms. McPhee is a prior recipient of a Fulbright Scholars’ Fellowship to India and Sri Lanka, a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.