Further explore the exhibition’s themes of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: The 1978 Parliament song “Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop” contains references to the hoops that Black people were compelled to jump through in white US society. This narrative is brought to life in the playful-sounding song recorded in the Black music funk style.

Ellen Gallagher’s rubber, paper, and enamel-on-linen artwork from 2002, also titled "Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop," celebrating Black aesthetics from this era, is a portrait of a Black woman’s face and neck. The woman wears her hair in a big round afro, but it is read as much more than hair. In this two-dimensional work, the afro sits like a disc behind her head and neck, creating a halo reminiscent of those behind the heads of figures in Christian, Hindu, and other art traditions.

This artwork is just over 8 feet wide and 10 feet high on dark gray linen laid atop lined paper. Near the top and the sides, a few very faint grid lines from the paper are patchily visible. The grid lines intend to impose an orderliness that is disrupted by tiny droplets of enamel on the paper, roundish and clear, catching glints of light. The droplets are sparse near the edges and gather into scattered clumps, like stars in a clear night sky, as they near the central image of the Black woman’s face.

She is also created from these same crystalline droplets, taking up merely one-third of the paper. The droplets are layered onto the page densely but slightly unevenly to create the texture of her full, perfectly round afro. Her facial features are created by a series of arcing, slightly wavering lines made of meticulously placed droplets on her oval face. The arcs are thin compared to the dark gray negative space between them, making them appear faint. It may even be hard to tell at first that there is a face at all, especially if viewed from a distance. Her eyelashes are thick and long around serenely half-closed eyes, her lips full, and her nose broad.

Many of Gallagher’s Black Paintings from the 1990s and 2000s layered materials onto photos of Black men and women or confronted the viewer with a series of disembodied features, such as eyes and lips. "Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop" presents one unadorned portrait, but because the woman is composed of glimmering dots and is not filled in with paint or another solid medium, the viewer must complete the composition themselves. As the dots coalesce into her form, the viewer may ask how and when they came to recognize this as a Black woman’s portrait.

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