Patrice Renee Washington:

Charts, Parts, and Holders

Patrice Renee Washington: Charts, Parts, and Holders presented a selection of work created by the artist between 2016-2018. Several of her works depict recognizable food items, organic and packaged, such as yams and Southern Recipe brand fried pork rinds. Additional new works feature the human body and tools used for grooming. These subjects have stereotyped associations with Black bodies and culture in common. Washington uses modernist conventions, such as the grid and a monochromatic palette–visual indicators of abstraction and objectivity–to disrupt the conventional interpretation of her subjects’ racialized meaning. The works expose an inadequacy of formalism, which here fails to eliminate political meaning. Washington adapts the grid and monochrome both to elevate the banal items she depicts and also call critical attention to them. The grids are neither pure geometric abstractions, nor reiterations of a single image; her palette is minimal but suggestive of flesh tones; and, though wall-based, her works are subtly three-dimensional and fabricated from a medium still associated with the craft. Presented together, these new works prompt questions about racial stereotypes and signifiers and the extent to which such ideas are conveyed in the marketing and circulation of consumer products.

Patrice Renee Washington was born in 1987 in Chicago. She earned a BFA at Metropolitan State University of Denver and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the US, including the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York; LeRoy Neiman Gallery and Sculpture Center, New York; Center for Visual Art, Denver; RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver; and the Open Shelf Library at MCA Denver. She has been granted residencies at Abrons Arts Center, New York; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, Colorado; Lighthouse Works, New York; Museum of Art and Design, New York; and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives and works in New York.