Ellen Gallagher, “Don’t Axe Me”

Ellen Gallagher was part of a wave of young African-American artists who emerged during the early-to-mid-1990s heyday of identity politics in art. But while her work would touched race, it did so rather obliquely, and in a fashion that seemed much more wrapped up in larger issues of self, myth, social and natural history, and the formal craft of making art. This midcareer survey is concurrent with one at London's Tate Modern, and includes a number of her quasi-abstract forays into marine life, such as a video installation created in collaboration with Dutch photographer Edgar Cleijne.