Patricia Patterson

Professor Emerita

Biography

Patricia Patterson graduated from the Parsons School of Design in New York. Before joining the Department in 1975, she taught art in Catholic grammar schools in the Bronx and Lower East side of Manhattan as well as the New School for Social Research. Patterson's career as a painter has been active since 1964. Her work has been exhibited at Downtown Whitney and P.S. 1 in New York, American Foundation for the Arts, Mills College in Oakland, in exhibits of Artists' Books which have toured the country, as well as the Navy Pier and the Nancy Lurie Gallery in Chicago, L.A.C.E. in Los Angeles, San Jose State University, San Diego State University, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. Most recently, Patterson has presented installations at the Quay Gallery in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Newspace Gallery in Los Angeles. Within the Department Patterson teaches Art and Politics in Utopian Societies, a graduate seminar which examines a series of 19th and 20th century communities of social reformers including the Shakers, the English Arts and Crafts movement (with special attention given to the political writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlysle), De Stijl, the Russian Avant-Garde, and the Bauhaus. She has also taught critical writing and painting on the graduate level. On the undergraduate level Patterson teaches Painting, Animal Drawing, Calligraphic Drawing, the Decorative Object and the Decorative Environment. Her course for the Introduction to Art-Making series concentrates on Folk and popular Art traditions, in particular on Mexico's Day of the Dead festival, Amish Quilts, and Newspaper Cartoons of the first half of the century. Patterson is a representational painter and a maker of installations whose work in recent years has dealt with the daily life of the Aran Islands, Ireland, presenting the land, its houses, rooms and inhabitants, as intimately conceived theatrical tableaux. Her most recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art entitled Here and There, Back and Forth continued the imaginative importation of people and places of the life-world into the art object, but expanded the field to include Southern California so that the work became a metaphor for communication between the two cultures. Her work is represented in San Diego by the Quint Gallery, in Los Angeles by Newspace Los Angeles, and in New York at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In February 1987, Patterson did a site installation at the University of Texas at Arlington Gallery. Reviews on Patterson include "Artists' Works Exhibit Their own Fear of Painting," Christopher Knight (photo), Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 17, 1983; "Patricia Patterson's Roisin Dubh' at Newspace," Richard Armstrong, Artforum, May 1983, pp. 103-104; "Patricia Patterson at Newspace," Sanda Agalidi, Images and Issues, Summer 1983; "A Satisfying Blend," David Lewinson, Artweek, November 5, 1983; "Patricia Patterson at the San Diego Museum of Art," Elise Miller, Art News, March 1984; "Patricia Patterson at S.D.M.A.," Jeff Kelley, Vanguard, January 1984; "Remembering the Past," Colin Gardner, Artweek, February 23, 1985; "Patricia Patterson," Orville O. Clarke, Jr., Artscene, February 1985.

Pat With Yellow Mug and Cigarette, 1986