© Ellen Gallagher
On view
Modern and Contemporary Art
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
Blubber,
2000
Ellen Gallagher, born 1965, Providence, RI; active Rotterdam, Netherlands, and New York, NY
2002-294
Gallagher’s Blubber is an incisive exploration of racial identity. Floating across its surface are small black marks and curves that appear abstract but recall faces, forked tongues, or lips. As in Gallagher’s other works, these shapes teeter between biomorphic abstraction and signifiers of racist stereotypes drawn from the tradition of minstrelsy shows. Blubber’s swirling curves cut from lined paper also suggest a turbulent seascape, a reference reinforced by its title, which is an homage to Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851). This seascape serves, in turn, as the stage for the Middle Passage slave trade as well as the universe of Drexciya, a mythical Black Atlantis populated by the unborn children of pregnant Africans killed at sea.
More About This Object
Information
Title
Blubber
Dates
2000
Maker
Medium
Ink, pencil, and paper on linen
Dimensions
305.0 x 488.0 cm. (120 1/16 x 192 1/8 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase and gift of the Class of 1952 in honor of their 50th reunion: Bruce Atwater, Roger S. Berlind, William Polk Carey, George B. E. Hambleton, Craig Lewis, Anne and Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, James E. Simpson, Gough W. Thompson, Jr., Burton J. Weiss and Nan S. Weiss, and Lucius Wilmerding III
Object Number
2002-294
Culture
Type
Materials
Subject
Bruce Atwater, Roger S. Berlind, William Polk Carey, George B. E. Hambleton, Craig Lewis, Anne and Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, James E. Simpson, Gough W. Thompson, Jr., Burton J. Weiss and Nan S. Weiss, and Lucius Wilmerding III, partial gift; to Princeton University Art Museum, 2002.
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2002," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 62 (2003): p. 107-161., p. 112
- John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 178, cat. no. 42; p. 179 (illus.); p. 317, checklist no. 440
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 135 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 135
