DeLuxe

Ellen Gallagher’s DeLuxe is arguably the most ambitious and groundbreaking print of the last fifty years—a multidimensional work both conceptually and, in its collaged incrustations and precise excisions, physically. All sixty phantasmagoric components use as their springboard advertisements from magazines (such as Ebony, Jet, Our World, and Sepia) produced for Black audiences between the 1930s and 1970s, a period that spans from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Pride movement. The pages that Gallagher chose as her source material are often edgy: advertisements for products such as wigs, hair pomades, and skinbleaching creams that promise Black people (usually women) ways in which to “improve” (often implying “whiten”) their appearance. The work spurs critical conversations about social equity that remain at the center of our national discourse.