Ellen Gallagher talks about her life and work through the art, literature, music and other cultural experiences that have profoundly affected her. She tells Ben Luke about the extraordinary opportunity she had to live with an original Keith Haring print while at Oberlin College, Ohio; her love of Diego Velázquez and Stanley Brouwn; the influence of the Afrofuturist mythology of the Detroit techno band Drexciya; how Herman Melville, in his novels and novellas, wrote more perceptively about race than he is often credited with, and much more. And, of course, she answers the ultimate questions we ask in each episode: if you could live with just one work of art, what would it be? And what is art for? This episode is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects.

Links for this episode:

Ellen Gallagher at Hauser & Wirth

Ellen’s page for the Sonsbeek 20-24 quadrennial

The Freud Museum, London

Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams, His Art and His Textiles

Keith Haring's Untitled (1982), The Keith Haring Foundation

Diego Velázquez at the Prado

Velázquez’s Infante Felipe Prospero (1559) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Headrest: Female Caryatid Figure (19th century) by the Master of the Cascade Coiffure

Ellen Gallagher’s Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2020) at Hauser & Wirth, London

Pieter Paul Rubens’s Miraculous Draft of Fishes in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne from the Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne

The Art Newspaper’s report on the racist joke beneath Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square

Ellen Gallagher’s Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, Are We Obsidian?, featuring her series Negroes Battling in a Cave

Oscar van den Boogaard on Stanley Brouwn in Frieze magazine

Go-go legend Chuck Brown on Spotify 

Hugo van der Goes’s Diptych with the fall of man and redemption (Lamentation of Christ) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Maryse Condé at World Editions

Ode à la Guinea by Aimé Césaire and more on Césaire at the Poetry Foundation

Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Poetry Foundation

Drexciya’s Futuristic Electro—a guide, by Albert Freeman at Bandcamp and Drexciya on Spotify

Herman Melville at Penguin Books

Kraftwerk

Alice Coltrane’s album Kirtan: Turiya Sings 

Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, BBC Radio 6 Music

Jan Mostaert’s Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?) (1525-30)

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