More than 160 works include Darrel Ellis: Regeneration at the Bronx Museum, the first institutional survey in honor of the late artist. Drawings, paintings, and photographs shed light on the Bronx native’s experimental, semi-biographical practice and span a career that sought to reframe black identity in visual culture and art history. Ellis’ works are complemented by an extensive display of ephemera: magazines, catalogs, exhibition posters, family photographs and diaries recording the artist’s hopes, fears and thoughts. As he grappled with anxieties about his family, his sexuality and the fear of AIDS – to which he would succumb at the age of 33 – Ellis meticulously documented his life. It is in these details that his voice is preserved.
Throughout his multidisciplinary practice, Ellis valued art history, paying homage to artists like Eugène Delacroix, Auguste Rodin and Édouard Vuillard. He borrowed elements from key works by famous artists, sometimes even recreating entire compositions. For an untitled work on paper circa 1990, he recreated a photograph of himself taken by close friend and fellow artist Allen Frame. Hanging on a wall behind Ellis in the artwork is an image of a painting he made based on Delacroix’s “Hamlet and Horatio in the Cemetery” (1839). Ellis’ own version (circa 1980-1990) is in the exhibition alongside the work on paper. In his journals he took notes and sketches based on his frequent visits to local galleries and museums, particularly the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawn from archives of more than 50 notebooks, dating back to his high school days, selections of diaries are displayed in glass cases throughout the exhibition and reveal moments of vulnerability, aspiration and anxiety.
While looking to the past and the field of art history, dominated by white, male and European artists, Ellis also considered his own history and was inspired by another artist: his father. Thomas Ellis was a photographer who died in an encounter with the police shortly before young Ellis was born. Darrel was inspired by his father’s photographs of family portraits, everyday events and festive gatherings. He projected the negatives onto irregular shapes and surfaces and rephotographed the results, distorting and obscuring faces and bodies, sometimes removing them entirely so only a glimpse of the subject remained. “It is currently impossible to try to show a whole – a ‘normal’ reality, since it does not exist,” Ellis wrote in a 1987 diary.
By incorporating his father’s negatives, Ellis’ work highlights the notable absence of black individuals in much of Western art history. Ellis reflected on black family life and domestic space by painting, drawing, and photographing the same subjects, especially portraits of her family members, over and over again. “In general, there has been an obvious shortage of self-portraits by black artists,” reads a 1990 diary entry, in which Ellis penned a letter to art dealers.
The diaries also reveal Ellis’ preoccupation with AIDS and mortality. “Do I have AIDS?” reads an entry from 1983. It is not known when the artist fell ill, but in 1984 his journals began to incorporate notes on vitamins and alternative medicine. He was hospitalized for AIDS-related illnesses in 1991 and died in 1992.
In the same window as the 1983 diary are reproductions of photographs that Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe took of Ellis. Hanging on the wall behind this display are works in ink and pencil on paper recreating these photographs. Ellis made them in 1989 for Nan Goldin’s seminal show on the AIDS crisis, Witnesses: against our disappearance at the Artists’ Area. Both Hujar and Mapplethorpe had recently died of complications from AIDS.
These connective threads create an intimate and personal lens to view Ellis’ practice. He has spent his life and career considering his identity as a black and queer artist in the context of Western art history and his own family and artistic community. Regeneration offers a poignant and heartbreaking story of the realities that Ellis and his colleagues faced, a story marked by loss, anxiety and self-determination.
Darrel Ellis: Regeneration continues at the Bronx Museum (1040 Grand Concourse, Concourse Village, The Bronx) until September 10. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Chief Curator Emeritus at the Bronx Museum, and Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photography at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
