The artist's deceptively beautiful work--colorful tapestries and garden-inspired installations created out of faux flowers, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, jewelry, and other embellishments--comes to life at The New York Botanical Garden, where she employs the beauty and symbolism of living plants to unearth the complex entanglements of race, gender and colonialism.

Accompanying a major site-specific exhibition of sculptural and horticultural installations by artist Ebony G. Patterson at The New York Botanical Garden, this volume provides deeper insights into Patterson’s multilayered practice. The artist’s work has long examined and experimented with the concept of the garden through a practice that uses beauty as an invitation to confront larger societal questions and concerns.

"The beauty, resilience, and fierce power of nature have always inspired artists. Ebony G. Patterson's exhibition "...things come to thrive...in the shedding...in the molting..." invokes this same awe, even as it compels our visitors to contemplate the ugliness of the human impulse to consume and control. For the first time, Patterson's art is presented simultaneously across gardens and galleries, where her creative vision, which generally incorporates a profusion of tapestries, faux plants, clothing, shoes, collaged paper illustrations, and photographs, all encrusted and adorned with costume jewelry, sewing notions, and oceans of glitter, occupies expansive space and incorporates living plants...Through Patterson's work, I hope visitors will gain new perspective on the potential for renewal and healing that is possible in acknowledging the less conventionally beautiful sides of nature and of ourselves." -- Foreword, page 7.