Ellen Gallagher, b. 1965 Providence, Rhode Island, Untitled, 1997, Ink and gouache, Museum purchase with funds provided by Wellesley College Friends of Art in honor of Lee Brown Ramer (Class of 1956) 2000.42

With this double image, two complete drawings on one sheet, African American artist Ellen Gallagher combines simple forms of minimalist abstraction with historically charged image-based narratives. Gallagher was born in Rhode Island in 1965 and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other programs in Ohio, Kentucky, and Maine. The upper drawing is comprised of staring and rolling eyes with full lips as a blond-haired girl, in profile, with a pointed tongue, sporadically interrupts the pattern. The drawing below repeats the full lips motif in a linear fashion with blue ink. The objectification of the body as pattern points to recurrent tropes related to race and aesthetics in contemporary art. Gallagher utilizes poetry, literature, visual history, and pop art as sources for her work, which addresses the troublesome history of Americana. Namely, this work references stereotypes of racial features associated with minstrelsy. Gallagher subverts and reinvents the established conventions of modernism in visual art with the addition of weighted content. These drawings first appear to be intricate abstractions set in a cool modernist structure, then reveal themselves as unnerving stories with loaded content; the layers of her work draw the viewer in to a moral conversation of cultural associations.

-Breslin Bell, Class of 2018

Museum purchase with funds provided by Wellesley College Friends of Art in honor of Lee Brown Ramer (Class of 1956) 2000.42