An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity

Ellen Gallagher’s multi-layered collaged paintings flicker between legibility and impenetrably intricate abstraction. Here, jagged lines and curling tentacles suggestive of foreboding sea creatures or flotsam and jetsam fade into the darkness of a swirling, textured background. The work takes as its subject the Tuskegee experiment, in which, starting in 1932, the United States Public Health Service followed six hundred Black men suffering from late-stage syphilis over the course of forty years. Although recruited with the promise of care, the subjects were never diagnosed and the doctors conducting the study refused to provide treatment. The work does not reveal what happened to the subjects of the experiment but instead suggests that the very notion of truth can float in and out of view.