Curator Conversation with Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson

Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her most recent accomplishments include acting as the Susan Brennan co-Artistic Director (alongside Ebony G. Patterson) of the 2024–2025 international art triennial Prospect.6 in New Orleans; and organizing the following exhibitions at MCA Denver: Suki Seokyeong Kang: Mountain—Hour—Face (2025, co-organized with Leilani Lynch); Cowboy (2023, co-organized with Nora Burnett Abrams); Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe (2023); Clarissa Tossin: Falling from Earth (2022); Eamon Ore-Giron: Competing with Lighting / Rivalizando con el relampágo (2022); and Jason Moran: Bathing the Room with Blues (2021). In 2016 Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker co-organized the acclaimed group exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art and in 2014 Lash organized the traveling retrospective Mel Chin: Rematch. From 2008 to 2014, Lash was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She currently serves on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and was a 2022 Fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership. 

Ebony G. Patterson‘s expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility, through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence in the context of “postcolonial” spaces. With the strong sensibility of a painter, Patterson works across multiple media – including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing and installation – united by her consistent visual language and intention. Each work is intricately embellished and densely layered, in order to draw the viewer closer and to question how we engage in the act of looking. The idea of the garden, both real and imagined, has formed an essential arc of Patterson’s practice. Framing the garden as an active site of power, Patterson explores it as a metaphor for “postcolonial” space and an extension of the body.

Patterson received her BFA in painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica in 2004. She received an MFA degree in 2006 in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts, Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky, and was the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the public collections of 21c Museum and Foundation, Louisville, Kentucky, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. In 2021, Patterson was included in both the Liverpool and Athens Biennials. She lives and works in both Chicago, IL and Kingston, Jamaica and is co-represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, and Hales New York/ London, co-presented Ebony’s monumental installation from the Liverpool Biennial at The Armory Show NY in Platform section curated by Tobias Ostrander.