Artist Highlight # 4: Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher, Photo by © Philippe Vogelenzang
Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) threads images that reference history, literature, marine biology and modernist abstraction, with an underlying theme of Black culture.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher is from a bi-racial family; her father was African American from Cape Verdean descent and her mother Irish-American. At the age of 16, she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio to study writing and later obtained her fine arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and received a scholarship for the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She was awarded the American Academy Award in Art in 2000 and was selected for the Venice Biennale in 2003.
As part of Darkroom Collective, a community of Black writers and poets, Gallagher had her first group show in 1993. Oh! Susanna (1993) is a canvas covered with repetitive symbols of what she calls ‘Sambo lips’ and ‘bug eyes.’ Gallagher addresses racial prejudices appropriating iconographic imagery derived from the exaggerated racist caricature of blackface found in the American minstrel shows from the early 18th century. This work caught the attention of the art institutions and was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 1995. In the early nineties, when Gallagher’s entered the art scene, Kara Walker (1969) and Michael Ray Charles (1967) were among the African American contemporary artists tackling the representation of race and discrimination as a central theme.
Oh! Susanna (detail), 1993. Oil, pencil, and paper mounted on canvas. © Ellen Gallagher. Source: Whitney Museum
Significantly influenced by the repetitive and layered writing of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Gallagher revises recurring motifs in her practice. ‘What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to jazz’, she has explained. Another influence in her practice has been the work of minimalist artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), particularly with the use of the grid as support to her paintings. Art critic and theorist, Rosalind Kraus wrote that minimalists artists use the grid as a formal element that, ‘announces…its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.’ Paper Cup (1996) however, is not void of referential narrative as it subverts the grid drawing a narrative of Black history. The work consists of a disarrayed grid formed by 84 pieces of yellow penmanship paper with tiny blue ink drawings that suggest, as Gallagher has commented, ‘disembodied lips have bruised into metaphor.’
Ellen Gallagher, Paper Cup 1996 © Ellen Gallagher. Source: Tate
Gallagher’s work is collected by major museums including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Modern, London. The latter holds six of her works, including DeLuxe (2004-2005), a display grid of 60 print advertisements re-appropriated from Black lifestyle magazines from the 1930s to 1970s. Gallagher intervened the found images of wigs, and skin lightening creams ads, with a variety of techniques such as collage, photogravure, paint, plasticine and embellishments. She accentuated and transformed the images of the idealised beauty of Black women and ‘liberated [them] from the “race” magazines of the past.’
DeLuxe, 2004–5 © Ellen Gallagher. Source: Tate
In Bird in Hand (2006), she layered a large canvas with references and collage, portraying ‘Pegleg’, a character inspired by dancer Peg Leg Bates and Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Gallagher merges this figure with marine life symbols that engage with the myth of Drexciya, a ‘Black Atlantis made up from women and children who went overboard during the Middle Passage.’ With a complex visual and critical language that combines figuration and abstraction, Gallagher continues to explore recurring themes. Her practice around the representation of race, transformation and cultural identity, invites critical inquiry and extended conversation.
Bird in Hand, 2006 © Ellen Gallagher. Source: Tate
Ecstatic Draft of Fishes, 2019 © Ellen Gallagher. Source: Gagosian
Sources
Eleanor Heartney, “Ellen Gallagher: Mapping the Unmentionable.” In After The Revolution. Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, 272- 295. Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2007.
Tate. “Ellen Gallagher.” https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ellen-gallagher-axme/ellen-gallagher-axme-exhibition-room-guide.
Rosalind Kraus, “Grids,” October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979): 50, https://doi-org/10.2307/778321.
Carol Armstrong, et. al. Ellen Gallagher: AxMe (London: Tate Publishing, 2013): 10.
Tate. “Ellen Gallagher: AxME – Exhibition at Tate Modern.” Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ellen-gallagher-axme
Art21. “Characters, Myths, and Stories.” Accessed July 1, 2020. https://art21.org/read/ellen-gallagher-characters- myths-and-stories/.
Further Reading
Dexter, Emma. “Ellen Gallagher,” Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. 351, Phaidon Publishing, London 2005.
Judith Wilson, “Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher,” Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Emerging Women Writers: A Special Issue, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring, 1996, 337-339.
Paloma Chavez Muente,
Contributor, MADE IN BED