Duke,

2004

Gallagher has long been fascinated by representations of race in the media and by the performance of race by individuals. Duke is titled after the eponymous hair pomade and takes its inspiration from a series of advertisements published in African American magazines after World War II. Products such as wigs, skin creams, and hair pomades (actual dollops of which adorn the heads seen here) offered a culturally-defined vision of beauty inextricably intertwined with the politics of race in mid-twentieth-century America. As Gallagher has said, such goods signal everything from “anxiety about assimilation and integration” to “hope, whimsy, and self-determination.” They are about life "despite/around/within stereotypes.”