This eye-catching collage by American artist Ellen Gallagher is one of the sixty prints that make up her striking 2004 work, DeLuxe. It comprises a selection of vintage beauty ads aimed at black American consumers, which the artist transformed using a variety of techniques, from etching to hand-embellishment, to “parody the ‘improvements’ offered by the advertisements and underscore in particular the role of hair as a signifier of difference” (to quote Tate Modern). “The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the ‘race’ magazines of the past,” Gallagher explained of the many vibrant prints, like this one, featuring elaborate, plasticine-enhanced hair adornments. “I have transformed them… on the pages that once held them captive.”
