Overview
Patricia Ekpo is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Art. She mobilizes the fields of black contemporary art, critical black studies, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the foundational role of structural antiblackness in constituting space, body, gender, psyche, and subjectivity in modernity. Her research explores this condition through sculpture, installation art, film, and personal ephemera and artistic documentation as lively social form. Patricia’s current book project examines the life and artwork of African American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) including her architectural painting, environmental and shack sculptures, photography, storytelling, and personal archival materials. It links the shared conditions of ruination and abstraction of Buchanan’s life and artwork to illuminate blackness as a form of lived abstraction.
Other current writing projects concern site-specific sculptures’ demarcation of black ontological and aesthetic heteronomy, the racially gendered contours of postminimalist sculpture, and black artmaking as potential Lacanian sinthome. Recent and forthcoming publications include “‘A Little Shortness of Breath’: The Open Black Body as Southern Architecture” (The Athenaeum Press; The Georgia Review), “Beverly Buchanan and a Blackened Psychoanalysis” (Studies in Gender and Sexuality 25:3, 2024), and “We (Don’t) Want the End of the World: Denise Ferreira da Silva Interviewed by Patricia Ekpo” (Parapraxis, 2023). Patricia’s research has been supported by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Mays Foundation. She is a contributing editor for Parapraxis Magazine, which bridges her investment in psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, social praxis, and critical theoretical lens.
