Abstract:
Ellen Gallagher is an American Artist born on December 16th 1965 (54 years old) in Providence, Rhode Island. Ellen Gallagher lives and works in New York and Rotterdam, Holland (in Europe). She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then attended an Art School in Maine.
She is American, but her ethnicity stems from her father who is African from Cape Verdean and mother who is Irish. Her mother raised both her and her sister on her own.
Gallagher’s work often contains deeper meanings about race and stereotypes, particularly for African Americans. Gallagher’s aesthetic has been influenced by the Minimalist style of painter Agnes Martin, and the repetition in novelist writings by Gertrude Stein.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, among others. Her work for me is all about wit, skill, craftsmanship and quality of ideas are like no other and unique to her interpretation of our world and its history. Ellen Gallagher executes her pieces in a playful way as well.
She encourages the audience to make these brilliant connections of her pieces in a form of satire that present issues of race and gender. Manipulating advertisements in the 1930s- 1960s that were targeted at black women and men
From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal; upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiplying in detail
The quote “A rose is a rose is a rose” repeats and reads like a play on words. This quote is a form of iteration frequently employed by Gertrude Stein, an innovator and pioneer of American literature. It was the writer’s literary style that influenced Ellen Gallagher to reflect the ideas of repetition and replacement in her own artistic creations as she continues to be the artist she is today.