{"id":29317,"date":"2013-03-04T02:21:34","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T02:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=29317"},"modified":"2013-05-19T19:41:57","modified_gmt":"2013-05-19T19:41:57","slug":"60-ways-of-looking-at-a-black-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=29317","title":{"rendered":"60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/01\/23\/arts\/design\/23lewi.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2005-01-23<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Edward_Lewine\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Edward Lewine<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/art21\/artists\/ellen-gallagher\" target=\"_blank\">Ellen Gallagher<\/a> dabbed a swirl of gray watercolor onto the delicate pencil drawing she had just sketched of a furry hamster. Late December sunlight radiated through the windows at Two Palms Press, the SoHo printmaking studio where she has spent the last 18 months preparing a work comprising 60 collage prints. Titled &#8220;DeLuxe,&#8221; it is the subject of its own show at the Whitney Museum, opening this week.<\/p>\n<p>Weeks remained until &#8220;DeLuxe&#8221; had to be delivered, and the mood in the lower Broadway loft was intense. One artist glued toy eyeballs onto a collage; another placed wig shapes made of plasticine clay onto a different collage; while a master printer was in a darkroom reproducing pages from black magazines like <em>Ebony<\/em>, <em>Sepia<\/em> and <em>Our World<\/em> that dated from the 1930&#8217;s through the 1970&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>Reserved in manner, with a sonorous voice and a girlish laugh, Ms. Gallagher seemed relaxed despite her looming deadline and pleased to see the first copy of &#8220;DeLuxe&#8221; nearing completion. (The set of 60 collages will be printed 20 times in a numbered edition.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I love this moment,&#8221; she said. &#8220;It is sort of delicious. You have come through the agonizing part, when you are trying to articulate what you want to say but can&#8217;t. You have made your ideas visible.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Until recently, Ms. Gallagher, 39, had charted a quiet if successful course as an artist, mostly as a painter whose work plays with ideas about race. In the past year, however, her career has gained momentum. Major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art have bought paintings; and the technical virtuosity of &#8220;DeLuxe,&#8221; the subject of her first solo show in a New York museum, is generating buzz&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Many curators praise Ms. Gallagher for her ability to discuss race without being pompous and for the way she balances ideas with technique. &#8220;She&#8217;s masterful at creating tension between form and content,&#8221; said Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which bought a Gallagher painting last year.<\/p>\n<p>Not all agree. Ms. Gallagher has been faulted for what some critics see as a certain facile quality. Writing in <em>The New York Times<\/em> about Ms. Gallagher&#8217;s winter 2004 show at the Gagosian Gallery, Ken Johnson called her paintings and collages &#8220;visually catchy&#8221; but &#8220;too obvious.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ms. Gallagher said she draws such criticism because her material makes people uncomfortable. <strong>&#8220;Somehow in America black artists aren&#8217;t allowed to use banal images of blackness,&#8221; she said. &#8220;On the other hand, the idea of something black and inscrutable is also very disturbing.&#8221;<\/strong>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Ms. Gallagher was raised in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Providence,_Rhode_Island\" target=\"_blank\">Providence, R.I.<\/a> Her mother was white, her father black. Her father, a professional boxer, was rarely around, she said, and died in 1998.<\/p>\n<p>Growing up, Ms. Gallagher said, she learned to navigate the worlds of her mother&#8217;s blue-collar, Irish family, her father&#8217;s family of recent immigrants from the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cape_Verde\" target=\"_blank\">Cape Verde Islands<\/a> and the homes of her friends, many of them African Americans&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/01\/23\/arts\/design\/23lewi.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman The New York Times 2005-01-23 Edward Lewine Ellen Gallagher dabbed a swirl of gray watercolor onto the delicate pencil drawing she had just sketched of a furry hamster. Late December sunlight radiated through the windows at Two Palms Press, the SoHo printmaking studio where she has spent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,8,20,25],"tags":[13837,4076,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-29317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-edward-lewine","tag-ellen-gallagher","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}