Ellen Gallagher Watery Ecstatic
The work of Ellen Gallagher is concerned with a desire to reclaim, renew and reimagine black histories in the African diaspora. She came to prominence in the art world in the mid-1990s with large works made with ink on penmanship paper mounted on canvas which is often compared with American modernist abstract painDng, especially the work of Agnes Martin.
In Gallagher’s paintings, however, we can see something very different going on from pure abstraction in Agnes Martin’s work in the dense patterns of tiny eyes and mouths filling the canvas.
They refer to the minstrel show. Minstrelsy was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface. Minstrel shows ridiculed black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, but also, happy go lucky and musical.
Disembodied heads, eyes, mouths hairpieces are creative responses to racial oppression: hairstyles, speech music, dance and dress and hairpieces, in all of which black people have found refuge. Her obsessive examinations have a focus: she pinpoints historical moments of transformation from black history – playing with entrenched stereotypes from the black consumer press that promoted black beauty through the purchase of wigs and hair adornments.
In Gallagher’s paintings, however, we can see something very different going on from pure abstraction in Agnes Martin’s work in the dense patterns of tiny eyes and mouths filling the canvas.
They refer to the minstrel show. Minstrelsy was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface. Minstrel shows ridiculed black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, but also, happy go lucky and musical.
Disembodied heads, eyes, mouths hairpieces are creative responses to racial oppression: hairstyles, speech music, dance and dress and hairpieces, in all of which black people have found refuge. Her obsessive examinations have a focus: she pinpoints historical moments of transformation from black history – playing with entrenched stereotypes from the black consumer press that promoted black beauty through the purchase of wigs and hair adornments.
