Kamau Amu Patton (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. Since 2016, Patton has been Assistant Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, in Sociology. 1 KINGS is a unique print from Patton’s Throne of Third Heaven Project, an interdisciplinary body of work in which Patton shrewdly integrates anthropology and fiction in order to explore African American spiritual practices. In part, the Project pays homage to the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, a dazzling foil covered assemblage built by James Hampton, an African American janitor and visionary artist who secretly created the intricate and monumental work, which is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, over the course of 14 years from about 1950-1964. In photographs, videos, and this singular digital print which borrows from an 18th century German etching, Patton deftly incorporates an image of himself seated in the midst of Hampton’s throne. This print illustrates the dramatic Biblical episode from the 18th chapter of 1 Kings wherein the prophets of the pagan god Baal are defeated by the God of the Israelites. In the midst of the burning altar is Patton’s clever rendering, suggesting the malleability of Biblical narrative and the specific association, within the African-American tradition, of the plight of the Isrealites in Egypt and the wilderness with that of the Black experience in America.

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