Ebony Patterson

Ebony serves as Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky. She has participated in several exhibits since 2002 and has been the recipient of several awards. In 2006 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Youth Awards for Excellence in Arts and Culture. This is the highest award that a young person can receive in this field in Jamaica. The body of work Gangstas for Life, explores notions of the machismo through exploring fashionable trends within Jamaican Dancehall culture. While the earlier works within this body explored the fashionable practice of skin bleaching, the most recent work has begun to include other fashionable exploits and examines a wider involvement of so-called “bling culture” and its reconstruction of notions of the masculine within a urban context . While still making references to Jamaican dancehall culture, the work raises larger questions about beauty, gender ideals and constructs of masculinity within so called “popular black’ culture. It seeks to examine the dichotomy between “camp aesthetics’ and its parallels within Dancehall culture. This body work raises questions about body politics and gender, gender and beauty, beauty and stereotyping, race and beauty.