Ellen Greene’s Ballad of the Tattooed Lady paintings on vintage leather gloves steer a tight ship between fashion and fine art. Greene paints tattoos historically delegated to men onto vintage leather gloves creating wearable narratives of contemporary feminine power. Greene’s chronology of American tattoos include stars, clipper ships, hearts, daggers, skulls, jaguars, eagles, mermaids, and pretty girls in states of undress. Icons and military symbols familiar as decorative masculine language become the cradles of political strife and abstracted tenderness. Greene’s work maintains a permanent vocabulary for soldiers, sailors, and criminals and builds up, pigment on leather, to create a conversation about motherhood, beauty, sorrow, and death. American tattoos were created by and for men as stories to wear on one’s sleeve. Greene’s paintings are beautiful and spooky, intimate and angry, removable and protective.
-Peregrine Honig 2012