The Gaines Center for the Humanities opened its “Origins” series with Ebony G. Patterson, who discussed her multimedia art on race, class and beauty at the Singletary Center Concert Hall on Thursday, Oct. 23. 

“Origins” is the Gaines Center’s 2025-26 annual theme, meant to explore art through the idea of beginnings and roots.

The theme coincides with the United States’ 250th anniversary, and is explored through public seminars, according to the Gaines Center website.

Dr. Shauna Morgan, an associate professor in creative writing, attended the “Origins” seminar with her class to understand how literary creatives engage with visual arts more broadly. 

“I think visual art gives us the opportunity to, you know, ask questions about our world, our place in it,” Morgan said. “And this artist in particular, really challenges us to push the boundaries of our own ideas of how we see the world, how we view the world.”

Patterson is a former faculty member of the University of Kentucky’s School of Art and Visual Studies and returned to open the “Origins” series after living split between Chicago and Jamaica since 2018. 

Patterson is a globally recognized artist with work featured in Alice Yard in Trinidad, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the National Gallery of Jamaica and more.

The event was facilitated by Stuart Horodner, UK’s art museum director, who asked questions based on images of Patterson’s art projected on a screen.

Some of the artwork largely focused on how city life impacts the ways men and women act and appear, known as metrosexuality, and what those norms look like for the Black working class, Patterson said. 

“I was looking at how the notion of metrosexuality seemed to apply to femininity and the language of femininity as a way of reimagining the masculine,” Patterson said. “Particularly thinking about the hyper masculinity that happened in popular cultural space, largely Black popular cultural space, and how that is shifting through fashion and that understanding.”

Patterson said her work focuses on systemic or ‘invisible’ social consequences through the ‘visible’ shifts like fashion. 

“I’m just asking the audience to dig deeper,” Patterson said. “That’s fundamentally what it pushes at.”

Her work “digs deeper” by challenging norms in race, gender and other social facets, Patterson said, by depicting variation in fashion or tools related to beauty. 

One piece, which Patterson created after seeing tragedies and deaths shared on social media “with an absence of thoughtfulness,” was shown at the event.

According to Patterson, the sharing of deaths on social media represents a reenactment of violence to the victim, the victim’s family and their broader community, who are often working-class minorities. 

“Thinking again about dress, and the way dress becomes our way of signifying value,” Patterson said. “When you think about a place, a nation, it’s the working-class that gives you those places for a nation, its visibility.”

Patterson explained how life expectancy is impacted by race in her multimedia piece “… three kings weep…” showing three young men who knew death was coming. Attempting to have one last piece of control over their lives, the men dressed themselves as a way to reclaim their dignity.

The piece challenged gender by displaying the vulnerability of these men in tears, highlighting violence against young men of color through fashion, Patterson said. 

On this issue of beauty, Patterson said, “What does it mean to witness your own ugliness?”

In response, Patterson created “…when the cry takes root…,” a sculpture of a peacock looking back on itself to see a clashing array of objects, ranging from gloves to embroidery, stuck to its feathers. 

According to Patterson, this display of the peacock questioning its pride is intended to ask society to question itself. 

Other artists worked with Patterson in practice and travel, where this idea of understanding the origins of something or someone was discussed. 

“We also thought that one of the key things in understanding somebody’s practice is also understanding from an ethereal place, where the work comes from, that they’re all of these non-verbal things, that make a thing, really, without being able to put words in it,” Patterson said.