Driving through any of the remarkably preserved colonial-era port towns of the Eastern Shore is like stepping into a time machine. Georgian brick townhouses stand alongside Federal and early 20th century Victorian styles. The streets aren’t built on a traditional cardinal grid, so it feels as though you’re always driving along the sea’s curve, even when the sea isn’t within direct view. If you had the inclination, you could stand on a wharf in Cambridge that served as a major regional center for both the transatlantic and domestic slave trades. Or you could visit The Hill in Easton — one of America’s oldest free Black communities in existence. Records indicate that free Black people worked as merchants, sailors, midwives, and carpenters at the Hill long before the start of the Civil War.
In the early 1800s, after the rise and subsequent fall of tobacco plantations in Maryland, around 35,000 enslaved people lived on the Shore alongside some of the state’s largest populations of free Black people. Frederick Douglass, who was born enslaved in Talbot County, returned 40 years later as a free, internationally famous man to deliver his “Self-Made Men” speech on the lawn of the Talbot County Courthouse. Today, a life-sized bronze statue of Douglass stands outside of the courthouse. The size and design of the statue was hotly debated for seven years before it was finally built, in part because local councilmen did not want it to overshadow the neighboring Talbot Boys statue, which was built during the Jim Crow era and depicted a young soldier holding a Confederate flag. The Talbot Boys statue was removed in 2022 following years of legal battles, but the history remains.
It’s because of these opposing forces in the Eastern Shore’s historical record that the region continues to stand at a crossroads today. And it’s in this context that I meet Jason Patterson, an Illinois-born artist who’s spent the last seven years working on the Eastern Shore, drawing and painting portraits based on photos from Washington College’s digital archive documenting the Black experience on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“There’s so much of American history, of African American history, that I think should be fundamentally known, and it is overwhelmingly not known. And to me, the purpose of the work is to make people know those things,” Patterson tells me.
“There’s so much of American history, of African American history, that I think should be fundamentally known, and it is overwhelmingly not known.”
Jason Patterson
In addition to his artist residency at Washington College, Patterson also serves as an adjunct professor in the college’s art department and has overseen various gallery exhibitions and community museum spaces connected to the college. His studio is in an old YMCA neighboring the Chestertown Cemetery. While the former YMCA’s gym sits dark and stagnant, the spacious, sunlit studio just up the stairs has the practicality of a fabrication studio. Patterson’s grandfather was an engineer, and he credits a group of engineers he lived with in Illinois with helping him develop his highly regimented artmaking process. Patterson himself has a calm, approachable demeanor. He wears a crewneck that reads “People’s Free Food Program: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,” and amiably shares details about Iraq War protest videos he cut together in high school to the soundtrack of Rage Against the Machine.
Meandering around his studio, Patterson’s attention to detail is evident. Several sheets of canvas document the color palettes of each of his portraits, complete with paint code numbers. A quarter of the studio is dedicated to his framemaking tools and materials. A pegboard wall stores cordless drills and electric saws, a heat gun, putty knives, and levels. On the shop table in front of these tools is a large wooden frame in progress — Patterson constructs unique, period-realistic wooden frames for each of his portraits. This is not the only facet of his process that is highly particular. He also maps each of the portraits onto a hand-drawn grid on raw canvas and then recreates the archival image piecemeal using soft or chalk pastels. It took years for Patterson to figure out how to draw the grids on large canvases.
The space’s high ceilings draw your eyes to the commanding portraits on the walls, which vary in size. His portraits of Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates are roughly postcard sized, while his stills of Malcolm X, drawn from a video, stretch over an approximately 4-by-6-foot swath of space in the area of the studio Patterson calls his library.
In the library are shelves of books: “The New Jim Crow,” “The Death and Life of Malcolm X,” and at least two different editions of “Invisible Man.” Also on the shelves are a James Baldwin prayer candle, a wooden duck which belonged to the artist’s grandfather, and a baseball glove (he’s a Cubs fan). The arrangement of personal artifacts among historical ones lends an intimacy to the work that highlights its significance — we can’t engage meaningfully with any historical discussion without confronting what it means to us personally, and to do that we have to look at the details, textures, and gradients of the past.
The arrangement of personal artifacts among historical ones lends an intimacy to the work that highlights its significance — we can’t engage meaningfully with any historical discussion without confronting what it means to us personally, and to do that we have to look at the details, textures, and gradients of the past.
Outside the library’s window, I can see the cemetery, where Patterson tells me former senator George Vickers is buried. Patterson’s portrait of Vickers hangs in his studio next to a document he created quoting Vickers’ argument against the 15th Amendment, which recognizes the right of African American men to vote: “The negro as a class, as a race, is unfortunately ignorant and superstitious; with some exceptions, he cannot read nor understand your Constitution, is unacquainted with your laws, institutions, history, and policy.”
The quote is an excerpt from a statement given by Vickers in opposition to Black suffrage. Patterson printed it on age-worn paper with foxing spots and frayed edges to appear as a written address to the people of Kent County in the mid 19th century. To create it, he researched period-accurate text and printed it onto a blank page torn from an old book. The portrait is drawn from a Civil War-era photograph of Vickers.
I’m struck by how effectively Patterson’s hand-built frames contribute tension to the images. The variety of wood and the depth of a shadow box can lend either warmth or menace to a subject. This effect is particularly arresting in the portraits he created of Washington College’s first three Black graduates. Washington College was founded and granted its charter in 1782, making it the first college chartered in the United States after independence. In 1960, 180 years after that charter, the college began admitting Black students. Patterson drew the first three Black graduates in 2020, the same year that the college’s graduating class decided to rename a building after Thomas E. Morris, Washington College’s first Black graduate.
In terms of their size, these portraits aren’t Patterson’s most imposing portraits — some of the canvases in his studio stretch almost 6 feet and he has created tapestries as long as 20 feet — but the kindness and humility with which they are depicted is especially compelling. Their shadow box frames are made of cherry wood and composite gold leaf, which casts a satisfying glow on the black and gray portraits. There’s dignity in the simplicity of the cards next to the portraits, which tell readers the names of the students and the degrees they earned.
Compare those portraits to his drawings of 1957 and 1961 yearbook photos of Washington College students performing a minstrel show in blackface. One appears to show a choir of students with black thumbprint faces and leering white paint around their eyes and mouths. The caption on the drawing reads “The Minstrel show revisited.” The other depicts a man standing at a podium in front of a group of students, all in blackface, with the caption “The Kappa Alphas and Rev. Doug Gates.” The photo depicts a reenactment of a Black church service and the “Reverend” title is meant to be tongue in cheek. Displayed in black coffin-like frames, the contrast between black and white in these drawings is stark and eerie. Patterson’s intention was for them to appear as “black holes.”
Patterson explains that he found the photographs by going to the Kappa Alpha pages of the yearbook. Historically, the Kappa Alpha fraternity was founded, at least in part, to honor Robert E. Lee and has been riddled with racist history. Washington College administrators contacted Gates, who was mentioned in one of the yearbook captions, to inform him he would appear, ignominiously, in the work.
“When they first reached out to [Gates], they said, ‘There’s this artist making work about Black issues’ and he was like, ‘Oh, he found the yearbook.’ He was like, ‘I knew this was going to happen,’” Patterson recounts.
Gates was embarrassed and took full responsibility, Patterson said. Gates also made an intriguing point: he said it surprises him that no one told him not to do what he did. Not a single administrator, faculty member, or student. Notably, one of the photos was in the yearbook in the same year that Thomas Morris would have been a student at the college.
Both the yearbook drawings and the portraits of the graduates are recreations of images that already exist, but Patterson’s placement of them in the same exhibit forces us to reckon with the fact that progress has not been a linear process. By themselves, the portraits of the graduates might appear as congratulatory artifacts signaling the college’s progressivism, but beside the yearbook drawings, we’re forced to reckon with the burden these students had to face in order to pave the way for future generations.
By themselves, the portraits of the graduates might appear as congratulatory artifacts signaling the college’s progressivism, but beside the yearbook drawings, we’re forced to reckon with the burden these students had to face in order to pave the way for future generations.
Similarly, his 2017 triptych, “On the Superhumanization of African Americans: Drawings after a 1992 Washington Post Newspaper Clipping,” recreates text from the clipping with a blurred, abstract painting of the video footage of LAPD officers assaulting Rodney King.
“When you put a whole paragraph on a canvas, you have to be prepared for people to not read it. You have to think about how you get people to read it,” said Patterson. “Whenever I put texts on a canvas, I think that it’s going to unlock something for people.”
In the case of the triptych, it’s tempting to rely on the text to help you decipher the image. Unlike much of Patterson’s other work, the figures of King and the officers are so distorted they are barely recognizable. The text doesn’t supply any convincing explanation. The reddish-brown text on raw canvas seems to vibrate in a disorienting way, and deconstructing the piece becomes an exercise in irony. The media and legal narratives that acquitted the policemen in 1992 become as illegible as the figures in Patterson’s painting.
The conversations that emerge around these works go deeper than the obligatory recognitions of harm that we associate with sanitized history lessons. They make obvious what history books would prefer to whitewash.
Patterson had told me that he’d had conversations with the families of the first three Black graduates of Washington College while working on the portraits, and I was fascinated by how his drawings from the Kappa Alpha pages of the yearbook had sparked Gates’ reflections on complicity. I wanted to know whether those conversations had influenced Patterson to explore other projects that brought him face-to-face with the subjects of his artwork.
“I feel how fundamental and morally and ethically important it is,” he says. “That makes me want to do it even though I’m much more introverted.”
He is currently conceptualizing a project that will require him to have many conversations with his subjects, though he will have a collaborator who’s more practiced in that art. Patterson and Baltimore photographer Jonna McKone have been discussing creating parallel works documenting the stories of Black people along the Eastern Shore.
“Basically the idea is to go down the Eastern Shore and talk to people in Black communities and learn their histories,” says Patterson. “She’s taking photos. I have a lot of archived photos from the Black archive the college has, and I want to pair those with landscapes that I’ll create.”
In one of the candid photos he shows me, a young groom in a white tuxedo puts a ring on his bride’s finger. The scenic wallpaper patterned behind them looks like a 19th century European pastoral scene. It must have been taken in someone’s home — a framed photograph of a little girl hovers in the background beside the bride’s skirt. Patterson has begun sketching the groom’s expression from various different angles. The caption on his sketches reads, “Study of a detail of a photo of Melvin J. Hamilton at his Wedding, 1956.”
Patterson wants the subjects of the portraits and their families to be involved with the selection of landscapes or sites that are important to them. The project brings me back to Douglass’ statue poised in front of the Talbot County Courthouse, outlasting the Talbot Boys. It’s a way to let disenfranchised residents of the Eastern Shore lay claim to the land, to say, “This place is a part of me, and I am a part of it.”
In the meantime, Patterson is completing two portraits of the Civil Rights activist Gloria Richardson, who led the Cambridge Movement during which protestors demanded the desegregation of schools and hospitals, public housing, and fair hiring practices for Black workers. A portrait Patterson made of Richardson protesting with her hands up, an expression of deep focus on her face, was shown at the “REVISIT/REIMAGINE” exhibit at the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum in Annapolis in 2024.
Patterson’s new pieces span a large stretch of one wall of the studio. One depicts Richardson and members of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the Pikesville Armory outside of Baltimore, where they were held following their arrest after protesting in Cambridge. During my studio visit, he was deeply immersed in the companion drawing, which portrays Richardson at the Campbell AME Church in Washington D.C., where she was giving a speech. The painting suspends an otherwise lively event into a single moment of poise. Though Richardson’s back faces the viewer and she is surrounded by faces, mostly men, she still manages to be the focal point of the painting. The rest of the crowd seems to acquiesce to her. In March of 2027, both portraits will be featured as part of an Afro Charities exhibit when their renovation of Upton Mansion is completed and open to the public.
Patterson frequently draws inspiration from Baroque and Victorian artists, and keeps art books with paintings by Diego Velázquez, Caravaggio, and Frederic Leighton open on the table next to the canvas. In the Richardson portraits, I can see the Baroque influence in the fluidity of the figures’ movements and their expressiveness. The Victorian influence comes through in his subject’s quiet, refined elegance. Patterson confirms that the fabric of Richardson’s dress in his current painting is reminiscent of the gown worn by the female figure in Leighton’s “Mrs. James Guthrie.”
Right now, Patterson’s portrait of Richardson at the Campbell AME church is upside down. In this orientation, the colors and forms in the portrait are more evident than the figures themselves, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to what the drawing is meant to represent. What stands out first are the creases and folds in the subjects’ clothing, the smile lines and frown lines, their veins, those vulnerabilities that humanize rather than mythologize. The primary purpose for the flip is so that Patterson can draw Richardson’s hair without allowing the dark pastel to fall on her lighter-colored skin below, but he also says that looking at the painting in a new way allows him to more faithfully render the forms from the photograph he’s painting from.
The technique strikes me as an apt way of thinking of much of Patterson’s work, and of the last 400-plus years of African American history itself. We have to keep shifting the ways that we interpret the past in order to disengage from our flawed and pervasive notions of what the past is.
It’s precise and persistent work.