Drawing Kinship with Ellen Gallagher’s Protean Practice

‘Tourists go to Amsterdam, not Rotterdam,’ Ellen Gallagher tells me candidly as we glide across the Nieuwe Maas river in a water taxi, heading for lunch. The artist draws my attention to the fact that Rotterdam is a working-class port city with a heavily Black and Brown population. From the vantage point of the white swans that float in the brackish waters, we note the social housing that hugs the shoreline, a cruise ship that serves as a haven for asylum-seekers and a submarine-wharf-turned-rave-warehouse nestled in the docklands. On the riverbank is a memorial dedicated to the abolition of slavery in the former Dutch colonies – Alex da Silva’s Clave (2013) – evidence, apparently, that the city’s residents are reckoning with their colonial past, even though research shows that non-white citizens in the Netherlands continue to face discrimination in the housing and labour markets.

Gallagher adopts a holistic view of Rotterdam. Nearly two decades after moving to the city – in a hasty attempt to distance herself from the New York art scene – she continues to see Rotterdam’s quirky attributes with effervescent eyes. She can point to the site where emigrating protestants embarked ships bound for America in the 17th century, and to the docklands that Dutch resistance fighters targeted when German Nazis occupied their country during World War II. In many ways, Rotterdam has figured into the fluidity of Gallagher’s thinking and art practice: the dark-hued painting series ‘Kapsalon’ (Hair Salon, 2015–ongoing), for instance, plays on the Dutch word for barbershop, which is also the name of a local dish of North African origin: French fries topped with shawarma meat and cheese.

Yet, while Gallagher has made Rotterdam her home, this isn’t the metropolis in which she garnered acclaim, having first made a name for herself in New York at the 1995 Whitney Biennial. One of the works that caught the art world’s attention – in particular gaining praise from critic Peter Schjeldahl in The Village Voice in 1996 – was the painting Oh! Susanna (1995). Technically complicated and visually appealing, Gallagher’s oil and pencil on canvas featured a repetitive display of ‘Sambo lips’ and ‘bug eyes’, as the artist calls them, which evoked the exaggerated racial stereotypes of African Americans in 19th-century minstrelsy. Through this visual grammar, Gallagher ignited a conversation around anti-Black racism in American life. Though initially compared to Agnes Martin’s abstract canvases, to which it bore a superficial resemblance, Gallagher’s work had its own agenda. As Klaus Kertess – then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art – said in The New York Times in 1996, Gallagher is part of a movement of painters who are ‘converting the rigours of minimalism into more narrative, subject-driven art’.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, to an Irish American mother and a Cape Verdean American father, Gallagher’s mind was constantly expanded by the wealth of culture made available to her – whether through the books her teachers recommended, or the live performances she watched whilst working as an usher at the Trinity Repertory Company. By the age of 30, Gallagher had been a carpenter in the Pacific Northwest, a commercial fisherman in Alaska and crew on a Caribbean sailboat. In one of our first conversations, we bonded over our class and college. Like Gallagher, I grew up in a working-class family, took on odd jobs and attended a small liberal-arts college.

Having trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Gallagher then became affiliated with the Dark Room Collective – a group of Black artists and poets who gathered in Boston to create art and to share their work during the late 1980s. ‘That was a magical and generous space for me,’ she recalls. ‘I would make my pieces and people in the collective would react to them: I loved it.’ Occasionally, revered guests – such as Samuel R. Delany, Ntozake Shange and Derek Walcott, among others – were invited to the Dark Room to share their work, wisdom and resources with young Black artists. In part, Gallagher tells me, she owes her artistic sensibility to that formative, collaborative experience.

As we chat over lunch, I witness the artist’s pedagogical prowess, too. Gallagher is the type of professor I wish I’d had: erudite and relishing the challenge of training a new generation to be their best. She goes to exhibitions and readings with her students and does studio visits to give them a sense of how to unearth their artistic practice. ‘Teaching allows me to get beyond the self to help people manifest,’ Gallagher tells me. Her manner of speech is edifying, and her frame of reference is expansive. To listen to Gallagher is to plunge oneself into a dynamic contemporary art history, from which prominent Black thinkers emerge as empathetic, sagacious and innovative. She weaves seamlessly between discussing Dutch history, art history and science.

‘You can see part of yourself. It’s like looking into the depths of a deep body of water.’

One moment, she is ruminating about Suriname-born Stanley Brouwn, whose unwavering demands to not have his work be photographed and insistence on only travelling by land and sea for his openings, she views as a strength of his practice. The next, about African American Charles White, who trained a generation of leading Black artists at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. But Gallagher’s references are not purely artistic. ‘How do we move beyond human time and towards a temporal landscape bigger than the human?’ she muses at one point. And, in another moment: ‘I consider Aimé Césaire’s and Édouard Glissant’s discourses on colonialism and archipelagic thinking to have been pivotal in opening up our ideas around Europe and the Americas.’ She also cautions against reducing artists solely to their biographies or places of birth, which too often flattens and divorces artists of colour from the complexity that makes them whole.

When I visit Gallagher’s studio, I am transported into a space that marries an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities with a French atelier. A vertical conveyor has been fitted to enable her towering paintings to be moved up and down as she etches directly onto the canvas. Below it, ripened by reagents and dredged in years of speckled paint, the floor reveals an archive of her labour, developing a panoply of shades, including the full spectrum of black. In Mobb Deep (1998), for instance – a work made of rubber paper and enamel on canvas – four greyish, prancing figures appear on a mostly black background, their bodies representing various gradations from black to white.

Arguably her best-known series to date is ‘DeLuxe’ (2004–05), a rectangular grid of 60 individually framed images of modified advertisements from mid-20th-century African American magazines, such as Ebony. One work, Advice for Bad Skin (2005), features a sequence of Black women’s heads above a text that reads: ‘Enjoy the pleasures that come with clearer, smoother, healthier and more kissable skin.’ However, the artist has besmirched each face with a circular daub of opaque white ink, gesturing not only to the promise and peril that flood our psyches when we purchase overpriced skincare products but, within the African American context, to the whitening of darker complexions to counter the unscrupulous realities of colourism.

When I ask peers about Gallagher, they describe someone who steers herself into deep thought. As Dia Art Foundation curator Jordan Carter comments on Gallagher’s Untitled (1999), a black canvas with a faint image of a Black figure: ‘You can see part of yourself. It’s like looking into the depths of a deep body of water. An alluring transparent opacity. It is a world kept at bay.’ Ashley James, associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum, told me how she was initially arrested by the visual complexity and historical richness of Gallagher’s practice, noting: ‘Her output is always sumptuous and varied, which means that each body of work is fresh every time.’ James included Gallagher’s Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop (2002) in the exhibition ‘Going Dark’, currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Comprising rubber, paper and enamel on linen, the work is mainly black with speckles of grey: at the centre is a female head with an expression simultaneously imperious yet uncertain, ringed by what might be an Afro or a halo – or both. This is precisely what James finds compelling about Gallagher’s work: that she can depict Blackness in all its mutable forms.

In her current solo exhibition, ‘All of No Man’s Land Is Ours’, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Gallagher assesses art history, abolition and the sea. At her studio, she shows me a catalogue essay she wrote about Paul Cézanne’s The Negro Scipio (1867) for a 2022 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. For many art historians, the post-impressionist painting is simply a study of anatomy. Gallagher, however, gives deeper consideration to Cézanne’s potential muse: a formerly enslaved man, known as Gordon, whose beatings at the hands of a plantation overseer left his back so shockingly mutilated that a photograph of him was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1863 to promote the abolitionist cause. In her essay titled ‘When Is a Place?’ (2022), Gallagher’s curiosity about Cézanne’s painterly inspiration expands to encompass an engagement with abolition networks in 19th-century European art.

In ‘The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman’ (1960), James Baldwin opined: ‘All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. If they are to survive, all artists are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.’ For Gallagher, the labour is not a source of anguish, but of profound enquiry. Curious, I ask whether her artistic practice has changed since the early 1990s. ‘I’m afraid to tell you it’s the same,’ she responds, before pausing for a moment, then correcting herself. ‘I used to develop a relationship to a project and not leave the studio for a few days while I worked on it. Now, I can go away for a period of time before returning to it.’ Devotion is part of the constellation of her process, but so is exploration.

As I leave Gallagher’s studio, I feel lighter than when I arrived, giddy from chatting with someone who reminds me of what I miss about Black American family and friends. Although we have both made Europe our home, we still hold space for our people in the same way we always did. Similarly to my Black elders preparing me a dish after I visit their homes, the artist has fixed a plate for my train ride to Paris. Like my own relatives would, she waits for my car to arrive, then hugs me goodbye. Another artist might have given me a frosty farewell but, with Gallagher, I am made to feel like her kin.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 240 with the headline ‘Profile: Ellen Gallagher’

Ellen Gallagher's solo exhibition ‘All of No Man’s Land is Ours’ is on view at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam until 10 March 2024

_{Main image: Ellen Gallagher, 2021. Courtesy: © Ellen Gallagher and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Philippe Vogelenzang}