Between January 23 and January 26, 2013 Ellen Gallagher, one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the 1990s presented her work in a variety of forums to classes and to the wider Yale community, including “DeLuxe” (2004-2005), a recent acquisition by the Yale University Art Gallery. “DeLuxe” is a complex highly imaginative and sophisticated artwork that employs a variety of mediums in an exploration of racial and gendered identities through the vernacular of black advertisements. “DeLuxe” appropriates and refashions ads from Ebony, Our World, and Sepia in a large and grid-like series.
A major retrospective, “Ellen Gallager: AxMe” is currently at the Tate Modern in London and will travel to the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Finland and then to the Haus der Kunst, Munich. In conjunction with this exhibition, Professor Hazel V. Carby lectured at the Tate’s “Afrofuturism’s Others” event on June 15. Gallagher is an internationally exhibited artist working in multiple mediums. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern, MOCA, and Pompidou and she has shown at the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial.