Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you visit the New York Botanical Garden from now until September, you might notice something different. Walking up to the Conservatory lawn, you'll see sculptures of birds placed among summer snapdragons, zinnias, and orange Mexican sunflowers. A lot of birds. There are more than 400 sculptures of vultures. Inside, you'll see glass sculptures like a massive peacock with a tail made up of more flowers. All of this and more is the result of the artist Ebony G. Patterson's year-long immersive residency with the New York Botanical Garden; the first ever for a visual artist within the space.

Patterson was born in Jamaica and lives and works between her home country and Chicago up in the Bronx. For this residency, she's got the opportunity to explore the Botanical Garden's extensive collections. The show is called Things Come to Thrive in the Shedding in the Molting, and it's on view now until September 17th. Ebony G. Patterson was recently awarded the David C. Driskell Prize in recognition for her contributions to the field of African American art, and Ebony joins me now.

Ebony, welcome to the show.

Ebony G. Patterson: Hi, Alison. Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: When this project was first proposed to you, this immersive year-long residency with the Botanical Garden, how was it described to you, and what made you say yes?

Ebony G. Patterson: It was first described to me as- [chuckles] it was, we could do whatever you want, whatever you want. We could do whatever you want. Then I had a panic attack and then they had to give me some space. [chuckles] I came back a few months later after having a conversation with my gallerist, Monique Meloche, who runs Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, who said to me, "Ebony, I don't think you understand what's being offered here."

She said this because I'm so used to making everything myself. The notion of having a team of people, an institution to work with to realize something, at the time when the opportunity was put forward to me, I think just seemed really overwhelming, but as I took some time after the initial proposal to imagine what could be possible, it became much easier to unfold.

Alison Stewart: As you began to observe the space and the environment of the New York Botanical Garden, what question did you begin to ask yourself? What did you notice about the environment that you knew you might want to respond to?

Ebony G. Patterson: Well, there were multiple trips. I came when they had the Burle Marx show, which is a Brazilian artist and landscape designer, and so it was interesting to come and see that show and to see what was possible. I remember learning at the time-- In the show, they had these massive palm trees, and it was explained to me that the trees were borrowed from another institution. I was like, "What do you mean the trees were borrowed?" To think a botanical garden also having a kind of similar operation to an art museum was something that I also learned in that moment, that there is a network across institutions and that these institutions have collections and sometimes these collections are shared. Of course, borrowing a tree, I also understood was an incredibly delicate and challenging process to uproot a tree from where it was to bring it to a whole other location. It required a lot of steps.

Then I came also too during the install of Yayoi Kusama's exhibition and seeing there, also too as somebody who has a studio practice as an artist, how did that then also become a part of the landscape, or what conversations existed between the work that Kusama makes and the environs of the gardens. I think it was after the Burle Marx show that that really set off a couple of questions for me.

Whenever I'm home in Jamaica, I'm home in Jamaica for really long stints. For the last number of years leading up to that particular visit, I think it was in 2019, every time I would go home maybe for like the three years prior, I would always go to the botanical gardens at home. It was a space I grew up going to as a child. There's also the zoo that's attached to it, so it's a whole botanical garden. For some reason, post my- not for some reason, but post my visit at the New York Botanical Gardens, when I went home that summer, I went home visiting the gardens with very different eyes and a very different set of questions.

That was spurred in part by my visit to the gardens and also too, the gardens in the Bronx, but also too because I had just come off of a residency at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas where I was busy in studio making works, thinking about botanical illustrations and the relationship that that had historically to a period of exploration and plunder and exploitation. Also too, during the course of the residency, I planted a small test garden with this idea in mind that the garden was meant to be a garden that was meant to die. Thinking about it, the garden as a metaphor for a post-colonial state. Also, thinking about plants in relation to the same way that a lot of bodies that ended up being on this side of the hemisphere that didn't have a choice, so too did the plants not have- many plants didn't have a choice in the way they arrived. When Black bodies traveled in slave ships in the bottom of the ships, plants were carried up top.

When I went back home that summer of 2019, it was difficult then, I guess having had these questions through the residency and then by extension, visiting the gardens immediately after the residency, going home to Hope Botanical Gardens, which came out of a colonial project during our colonial period, it also made me ask the question about what was here. It wasn't even something that I thought about, and there's nothing on the property anywhere that spurs this question, that indicates its history in any way. I found that also too when I visited the New York Botanical Gardens, I was asking those questions before I'd gone home. I was asking, what was here?

It's also not strange for us, I guess in some ways, thinking about what gardens are and what they do and thinking also too about public gardens in relation to city spaces. They're meant to be sites of leisure and relaxation and the escape of beauty. The notion of thinking about the garden as a site that holds history of horror is not something, I think, that we generally consider. I felt like what would it mean to peel back those layers to almost think about the garden almost as if it was a rug. A rug, as an embellishment on the floor, and what would happen if we would just pick up its corner?

I remember Glissant had written a statement that the landscape, in relation to the Caribbean, that the landscape is our only monument, but I think that that is also applicable to any post-colonial space. That there is truth in that the landscape, that in between all of the leaves, below all of the roots in the soil, that all of the truth of all the life and evidence of life lived and all of the trauma is held in the soil, and that to find that truth, one has to go in between it all.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ebony G. Patterson. She's the artist who has the first- she's the first visual artist to have a residency with the New York Botanical Garden. Her exhibition is called Things Come to Thrive in the Shedding in the Molting. It's on view at the garden until September 17th.

I want to describe for people; as you arrive outside the Conservatory, there are these 400 vultures, I've read this, so please correct me if I'm wrong, Ebony, made of high-density foam and they're sort of dotted around the garden. When did you first become interested in vultures as a concept in this exhibition?

Ebony G. Patterson: Yes, so I tend to come to things, I feel like, sometimes in the middle of the night, I go down this weird-- There were a couple of earlier wall-based works that I had used. I was trying to find ways to use birds or use other elements beyond the figure which was so central in the work to, I guess, broaden the narrative or to broaden the possible readings of the work, and to think about the use of birds or other kinds of animals that may pop up as a metaphor. Sometimes there are snakes that pop in. There are some earlier works where I use owls as a metaphor for witnessing, but then also like complicating the relationship of owls but thinking about them in relation to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Yes, I went down this weird well one night just wondering if I could. Because I was so preoccupied with metaphors that related to death, I thought like, "Oh, could I find a vulture?" I was looking for a ready-made, and then serendipitously found a ready-made vulture. It was described as a bald eagle and trust me, Alison, there was no mistaking this, it was a vulture. It was not a bald eagle. Another site described the very same form as a vulture. It was like decorative garden ornaments. It's also really intriguing, that whole other world that Black people use to decorate their gardens.

Anyway, so I was working on a piece in the studio at the time that was really centered a lot around women's bodies. As I've gone into thinking more about the garden, I found that the relationship between the- like the garden is feminine. I've also been thinking about this notion of men die, women cry, thinking about the notion of witnessing, or we think about like communal violence in a lot of working-class communities, women often become the voices for the deceased.

Then I was also thinking about this notion of, what's the difference between the sound of a wail and the sound of a lament? I was thinking through like when you come into the world, you come through a woman's body and that is signaled by a wail, so a woman's voice signals that you've entered the world. Then also when you exit, a sound is also signaled by a woman but it's a lament, it's a bawling, it's the crying. I was thinking about all of these points of passages and how that also relates to the garden, thinking about women's bodies in that relationship.

In this one work, I had these three female-presenting figures and from behind, they- we were seeing them from behind, so it was almost as if we were witnessing them witnessing something else. Between the audience and the images of these women were about nine vultures. The gathering of vultures for consumption is called a wake. When we also think about what it means to-- When we think about burial or the funerary, the wake is what happens when-- Say, for example, in my own traditions, growing up in Jamaica, the wake is what happens before the funeral. It becomes like a period of extended celebration. It's a sitting-in-community but as it relates to this body that has passed on. It's a period of mourning or it relates to the acts of mourning.

I was just thinking that these three women in some ways also echo like our historical reference around the three Marys. Then also too, I guess it also seemed biblical. The three Marys who turn up at Christ's tomb, they all showed up for love. These women who come to tell us about their loved ones when there's a shooting or when there's violence that's happened in our community, they come to tell us publicly; they also show up as an act of love. I was thinking about the vultures in the same way, that the vultures show up as an act of love for the land.

Alison Stewart: And people can see them at the New York Botanical Gardens. My guest has been Ebony G. Patterson. Ebony, thank you for sharing your practice with us.

Ebony G. Patterson: No worries.

 

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