Mixed Race Studies

In Black and White

New York Magazine
2005-05-21

Mark Stevens

“Ellen Gallagher: DeLuxe” confronts issues of race not with hectoring but with clever, even antic, satire.

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison explored not only overt expressions of racism but also its more hidden, corrosive elements. African-Americans suffered from metaphysical wounds. They were “invisible,” seen not for who they were as individuals but for what they represented as a group. Blackness was a kind of impenetrable mask. Appearance was all. Historically, many African-Americans have tried to escape from this prison. Some whitened their skin or straightened their hair. Others took up the white-skirt profession of nursing. Still others made a fetish of blackness by wearing enormous Afros. Usually, however, one mask was merely being exchanged for another. The poster boy for such psychic wounds is, of course, Michael Jackson.

In a captivating small show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ellen Gallagher is now exhibiting a portfolio of 60 prints, called “DeLuxe,” that makes serious sport of this effort to fashion a new appearance that can pass inspection. Gallagher searched through black magazines such as Sepia and Our World, mostly from the years before the civil-rights era, looking for material on the theme. Often, she picked advertisements. Ads from old magazines are always fascinating—usually, things look simpler and more innocent, which is an appealing illusion. Here, the proffered promises are often poignant. A skin whitener is an elixir: You will be “Made for Kisses,” with “The Lighter, Smoother Skin Men Adore.” A presentation of wigs allows you to pick a ready-made identity, from “cutie” and “supreme freedom” to “semi-Afro” and “curly gypsy.”…

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Ten-Minute Talk: MoMA Conservator Scott Gerson on Ellen Gallagher’s Deluxe

Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
2012-03-05

Sarah Kennedy, Associate Educator, Lab Programs

Janelle Grace, Adult & Academic Programs 12-month Intern

This week’s Ten-Minute Talk features Scott Gerson, Associate Conservator in MoMA’s Department of Conservation who discusses the materials and processes explored in Ellen Gallagher’s featured work Deluxe on display in the Printin’ exhibition.

As part of Print Studio, we offer a weekly series of short talks focusing on issues related to the medium of print and the sustainability of ideas within the context of modern and contemporary art. During these Ten-Minute Talks, a variety of MoMA staff—from conservators to librarians and archivists—as well as guest artists and educators, share their expertise, offering insight on a variety of topics and a special behind-the-scenes look at MoMA’s engagement with the medium of print and selected Print Studio projects.

For more information, click here.

Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

Callaloo
Volume 19, Number 2, Spring 1996
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492
pages 337-339
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1996.0074

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

What she said once, unforgettable, was that the stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our real, our black bodies—& the image

[T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; … for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars. —Aristotle, The Poetics Image

These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion. In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she…

Artist Ellen Gallagher humbled by new honor

The Providence Journal
2010-02-21

Bill Van Siclen, Journal Arts Writer

The first time her work appeared in a Whitney Biennial, the every-other-year exhibit that aims to take the pulse of contemporary art, Ellen Gallagher was just one of many up-and-coming artists vying for attention.

That was back in 1995, when Gallagher, a Providence-born painter and printmaker whose interests range from carpentry and scrimshaw to African-American history and culture, was barely out of art school.

Fifteen years later, Gallagher is Biennial-bound once again.

This time, however, she’s returning as a certified art star — someone whose work is avidly collected by major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum, and whose name is regularly mentioned alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Even the Whitney Museum, which organizes the Whitney Biennial (and where the show’s 2010 edition opens Thursday), has several of her works in its permanent collection…

…WHILE MANY ARTISTS draw inspiration from a variety of sources, Gallagher’s reference points — everything from slavery to sea creatures to Sun Ra — seem particularly wide ranging. Then again, so is her background.

Born in 1965, Gallagher grew up in a biracial household headed by her father, an American-born Cape Verdean who traced his roots back to 19th-century whalers and who did odd jobs to support the family, including occasional stints as a professional boxer.

When he left suddenly, the burden of raising Gallagher fell on her mother, a white Irish Catholic who eventually saved enough money to buy a house in Providence’s Washington Park neighborhood…

Read the entire article here.