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Blame it on Pittsburgh...or, Why I became an artist?
An autobiographical installation-in-the-dark by Fluxus Artist Ben Patterson. January 30 - February 22, 1997 Opening Thursday, January 30th, 6:00 - 8:00 In 1991 Ben Patterson was invited to return to his home town, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as artist-in-residence and guest lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University. At the same time, The Pittsburgh center of the Arts presented Fluxus Deluxe, a compilation of six Emily Harvey Gallery exhibitions including Ben Patterson's first version of Ordinary Life and this installation. To prepare of the installation, Patterson spent six weeks in Pittsburgh visiting a psychotherapist for one hour a day, five days a week at 7:00 a.m. The purpose of these sessions was to discover if the process of growing up in Pittsburgh as a relatively privileged black American in the 1940s and 1950s (a time when de-facto and invisible racial prejudice was the norm in most northern cities) had anything to do with his eventual renunciation of classical art traditions and his subsequent move to avant garde art. Ben Patterson was born in Pittsburgh in 1934. In 1960 he moved to Cologne, Germany where he became active in the radical contemporary music scene. He was in Wiesbaden with George Maciunas to organize the historic 1962 Fluxus International Festival and he continued to be a major presence at Fluxus events until the early 1970s, when he retired to pursue an "ordinary life." Although he remained outside the art world for more than 17 years, he did surface for such events as the 20th Anniversary Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden in 1982 and the 1983 Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1988, Patterson came out of retirement with his exhibition titled Ordinary Life at the Emily Harvey Gallery. In 1992, he returned to Germany to establish a headquarters from where he works and travels. Ben Patterson's work has been featured in the many recent Fluxus exhibitions. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and performances in Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Americas. Patterson recently became the first American to reach the summit of Mt. 13th Month in Namibia, Africa. During this venture, he also inaugurated the Public Entrance to his Museum for the Subconscious. Emily Harvey S. Polo, 322 30125 Venice, Italy
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