AxME
I recently had a lucky opportunity to visit Ellen Gallagher's exhibition AxME at the Tate Modern in London, before its ending. It is a great show, the very first major retrospective in the UK of this American artist, displayed through eleven rooms. The title, AxME is referring to they way black native American were pronouncing 'ask me' and also to the 'Acme Corporation' a fictional company featuring in the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Her artistic world is soaked in an American culture but experienced through a personal family perspective and origin. Being of a biracial ethnicity (the father was born in US but his family was from Cape Verde and her mother was Irish), her imagery goes from wigs advertisement in vintage African American magazines and African diaspora to oceanography, science fictions and writings of Gertrude Stein (American writer and poet). I saw Callagher's work for the first time in Santiago de Compostela at the opening sh...