On view September 21–December 14, 2024

Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) presents …three kings weep…, a large-scale video installation by Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). An Opening Reception will be held at Tephra ICA on Saturday, September 21, from 5–7pm, and will feature a talk by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VMFA. RSVP here.

Experience the visuals, sound, and emotion in a large-scale video installation by Ebony G. Patterson. Shown slowly in reverse, Patterson’s film portrays a trilogy of three men, each on a separate screen, dressing themselves while tears quietly roll down their cheeks. Like the triptych paintings often found on the altar pieces at the front of churches built during the Renaissance, these figures occupy a chapel-like space where viewers can sit and contemplate their presence.

The voice of a young boy reading the poem “If We Must Die,” by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, frames the scene. McKay wrote his poem, published in 1919, following weeks of race riots dubbed “the Red Summer,” in which hundreds of African Americans were killed during attacks on Black communities in several cities across America. One hundred years later, Patterson reiterates McKay’s words as a soundtrack to her visually arresting work, exposing the continued vulnerability of Black bodies in our present society.

“I wanted to present these bodies in a way that allowed space to demonstrate the full sense of potential of their vulnerability,” – Ebony G. Patterson