Ellen Gallagher

What is crucial to my making of a language and a cosmology of signs is the type of repetition that is central to a lot of the music I am listening to right now. . . . I start off with a limited class of signs and, like stacking in music, I chop and revisit the changes to build structure. —Ellen Gallagher Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Oberlin College, Ohio; artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1993). Her interests in these years spanned across disciplines and time periods, including oceanography, microscopic life, popular media, the poetics of Black vernacular language, and the formal geometries of postwar abstraction. In her first major body of work, made in the mid-1990s, Gallagher applied penmanship paper to canvas in uneven grids, filling the pages with small repeated pairs of stylized lips that she both drew and printed in blue ink. These works thus hinged the aesthetics of 1960s Minimalism to racist minstrelsy and blackface physiognomy. Other biomorphic forms (eyes, tongues, and hair) appear in abstract clusters throughout her oeuvre. In 1998 Gallagher produced a small group of black monochromatic paintings as a direct response to the critical interpretations of her previous works. Starting again with squares of paper on canvas, she added more geometric shapes, creating a textured terrain that she built up with cut rubber. She further inscribed and collaged aleatory motifs from mid-century American race magazines and other sources, then painted the canvas in layers of black enamel. With this thick, reflective surface, Gallagher suggests that the psychosis of race relations is embedded in the history of Western abstraction. Gallagher was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art in 2000 and began her ongoing Watery Ecstatic (2001–) series the following year. In Watery Ecstatic , she invents complex biomorphic forms that she relates to the mythical Drexciya, an undersea kingdom populated by the women and children who were the tragic casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. Cutting into thick paper in her own version of scrimshaw—the practice of carving whale bones—Gallagher invests the afterlives of the Middle Passage with a sense of material control, her intense focus giving rise to new peripheries. Drexciya is featured again in Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–04), made in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne. Combining celluloid film with computer animation, Gallagher and Cleijne developed an aesthetic that emerges from the intersection of archival sources, fiction, and memory. In the multipart works eXelento (2004), Afrylic (2004), and DeLuxe (2004–05), black-and-white images pulled from archival magazines—issues of Ebony , Sepia , and Our World from 1939 to 1972—are digitally scanned, recombined, and overlaid with Plasticine, velvet, googly eyes, and oil. Many of the found images are advertisements for slimming aids, underwear, hair relaxers, wigs, and skin bleaching creams targeted to African American women. DeLuxe was the subject of Gallagher’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2004–05. In 2006 Gallagher made Bird in Hand , a large-scale, mixed-media canvas depicting a black pirate or sailor holding a parrot, with amorphic swirls around his head transforming into multicolored kelp-like shapes. Inspired by both Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the Cape Verde archipelago, the protagonist in the painting, “Pegleg,” is a recurring character in Gallagher’s art, combining her long-standing interest in underwater forms with her critical engagement with the history of Cape Verde, where her father’s parents were born. From 2008 to 2012 Gallagher worked on Morphia , a series of double-sided drawings displayed in custom glass and metal cabinets, in which representations of transformed artifacts merge with marine imagery to create transparent palimpsests resembling stroma or organic matter. As they mutate and congeal, microbial patterns seem to convey a certain euphoria, a narcotic state suggested by the series title. In 2010, for the Whitney Biennial, Gallagher and Cleijne created Better Dimension , an installation in which the outer walls of a large room were silkscreened with writings by Afrofuturist pioneer Sun Ra, the Martian canals of Percival Lowell, as well as the long legs of singer and bassist Shingai Shoniwa. Inside the room, projections showed syncopated sequences of painted glass slides and John F. Kennedy’s head rotating above a black vinyl LP. Three years later, in 2013, AxME opened at the Tate Modern, London and traveled to the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Finland, and Haus der Kunst, Munich; Don’t Axe Me opened at the New Museum, New York, that same year. In the film installation Highway Gothic (2017), Gallagher collaborated with Cleijne again, examining the impact that Interstate 10 is having on people and nature in the Southern United States. Originating at Prospect.4 in New Orleans, Highway Gothic has continued to develop and was included in solo exhibitions of Gallagher’s work at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and the Power Plant, Toronto, in 2018. Synthesizing a wide range of pictorial traditions, and working across national borders, Gallagher counters static representations of Black Being and allows both abstraction and figuration to become portals to a world in which subject becomes form—as reality and dreams combine.