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Ellen Gallagher
Born
Ellen R. Gallagher

(1965-12-16) December 16, 1965 (age 59)
Providence, Rhode Island, US
Education
  • Oberlin College
  • Studio 70
  • School of the Museum of Fine Arts
  • Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Known for
  • Painting
  • Mixed media
Movement Contemporary art

Ellen Gallagher, born on December 16, 1965, is a talented American artist. Her amazing artwork has been featured in many art shows, both by herself and with other artists. You can find her pieces in the permanent collections of many big museums around the world. She uses different materials like paint, paper, film, and video to create her art. Some of her works explore ideas about identity and how society organizes things.

About Ellen Gallagher

Early Life and Family

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father's family came from Cape Verde in Western Africa, and her mother's family was Irish Catholic. This means Ellen has a mixed heritage. Her mother worked hard, and her father was a professional boxer.

Education and Early Jobs

Ellen went to a special school called Moses Brown School in Rhode Island. When she was sixteen, she started studying writing at Oberlin College in Ohio. She didn't finish her studies there. Instead, she joined a carpenters' union in Seattle. Before becoming a full-time artist, Ellen also worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and Maine.

In 1989, she went to Studio 70 in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. Then, in 1992, she earned a degree in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She continued her art education in 1993 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Ellen Gallagher's Art Career

Ellen Gallagher became well-known as an artist in 1995. Before her big show at Gagosian, she had solo exhibitions at Mary Boone in New York and Anthony D'Offay in London. She chose Mary Boone's gallery for her first solo show in New York because she felt it was a neutral space where the abstract parts of her art would stand out first.

Exploring Her Artwork

Gallagher, Wiglette from, DeLuxe
Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe (2004–2005)

Ellen Gallagher is known for her abstract paintings and multimedia art. She often creates minimalist pieces that tell stories. She gets ideas from artists like Agnes Martin and writers like Gertrude Stein.

Unique Art Techniques

A lot of Ellen's work involves changing advertisements from magazines that focused on African American communities, like Ebony and Sepia. Her DeLuxe series is a great example of this. In this series, she made grid-like collages using magazine images. Famous pieces from this series include eXelento (2004), Afrylic (2004), and DeLuxe (2005).

The DeLuxe series shows how many different ways Ellen creates art. She used techniques like photogravure (a way of printing photos), digital printing, and even oils to combine different sheets of paper and add texture. She used new technologies to create many layers in her art. Each piece in this series can have more than 60 prints, using methods like etching, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, and offset lithography. She also glues drawings from notebook paper onto her canvases to create interesting surfaces.

Combining Art Styles

Ellens art combines ideas from three different art movements: Abstract expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art. Even though she doesn't say her art belongs to just one style, many people describe her work as unique and interesting. She mixes these different styles to create detailed and one-of-a-kind pieces that are both abstract and minimalist, with a touch of pop art.

She sometimes uses cartoon-like images or transformed advertisements. Her work can make viewers think deeply about images they might usually ignore.

Influences and Themes

While studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Ellen was influenced by the Dark Room Collective. This was a group of poets who lived and worked in Cambridge, MA. Ellen became the art coordinator for this group, which helped her explore her talent and connect her culture as an African-American woman to her art. One of her first art shows was at the Dark Room in 1989. Other artists who influenced her include Susan Denker, Ann Hamilton, Kiki Smith, and Laylah Ali.

Themes about identity and culture often appear in Ellen's work. She uses symbols, codes, and repetitions. She also uses images that refer to old stereotypes, sometimes scattering them throughout her collages. She was inspired by the New Negro movement and modern abstract art. Ellen also uses old historical images in her work. She combines formal elements, like grid lines or ruled paper, with these images to show how society organizes things.

Ellen is also known for showing bodies and including parts of poetry and pop culture in her art. She uses golden colors to represent different groups in society. Her art includes paintings, works on paper, film, and video. She has found new ways to use materials, like carving images into thick watercolor paper, similar to scrimshaw (carving on bone), and drawing with ink, watercolor, and pencil.

Her long-running series, Watery Ecstatic, started in 2001. It includes paintings, sculptures, and animations that show sea life using Afrofuturism ideas. These works depict sea creatures from a mythical undersea world. Ellen has said that making these drawings is her own version of scrimshaw, like sailors carving into bone when they were at sea. She imagined that this carving would help them focus and feel in control in the huge, scary ocean.

Some of Ellen's work also uses codes made from cut-out letters. In some of her early pieces, she painted and drew on sheets of penmanship paper (ruled paper used for handwriting practice) that she had glued onto canvas. She chose penmanship paper because she felt it was a "neutral surface" that could hold any mark, which she saw as a way to show freedom. As her earlier work was sometimes seen as too focused on race, her newer work uses less obvious images to make viewers think.

Exhibitions and Recognition

In 1995, Ellen Gallagher's work was shown at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2003, which are very important art events. The artist Chuck Close even created a tapestry portrait of Ellen Gallagher in 2009. Ellen is represented by major art galleries like Gagosian Gallery in New York and Hauser & Wirth in London. She lives and works in New York City and Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Awards and Honors

Ellen Gallagher has received many awards and honors for her art, including:

Where to See Her Art

Ellen Gallagher's art is part of the permanent collections in many museums around the world. Some of these include:

Selected Artworks in Collections

Here are a few examples of her specific works and where they can be found:

See also

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