Ellen gallagher, bird in hand

Ellen gallagher casarotto
Ellen gallagher afrofuturism
Ellen gallagher collage

•

Ellen Gallagher

Artist Bio

“I am interested in signs not as static but as moving, as things that start with something that has already been discarded. I try to make my images through. . . the unruly cracks in the edifice, underneath which there is something to be protected.” —Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher’s multimedia practice explores the history of beauty and images in our collective American history. In her hands, modernism itself, both as an ideological stance and as a formal imperative, is shown to have existed through loss and suppression of the narratives of race and gender. Her inquiry takes a polyvalent approach, showing how various forms of media, such as literature, music, and fine art as well as popular magazines and films, used stereotypes to perpetuate social customs derogatory to African Americans. Her work recovers these histories, setting them into aerated aesthetic motion.

At the start of her career, Gallagher used the rules and effects of high modernist abs

•

Ellen Gallagher

American painter (born 1965)

Ellen Gallagher (born December 16, 1965)^[2] is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict "ordering principles" society imposes.

Background and education

Gallagher was born on December 16, 1965, in Providence, Rhode Island. Referred to as African American,^[3] she is of biracial ethnicity; her father's heritage was from Cape Verde, in Western Africa (but he was born in the United States), and her mother's background was Caucasian Irish Catholic.^[4] Gallagher's mother was a working-class Irish-American and her father was a professional boxer.^[5]

In Rhode Island, Gallagher attended Moses Brown, an elite, Quaker college preparatory school. At sixteen, Gallagher entered her first year at Oberlin College in Ohio (1982–198

•

Welcome to your watchlist

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, and lives and works in New York and Rotterdam, Holland. She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004–05). Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later, she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these “narratives” into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements, as a kind of chart of lost worlds.

Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and insistences. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal; upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, an