ISSUE 16
Darrel Ellis by Drew Sawyer , page 17 / Fall 2018
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Solo Exhibition at OSMOS Address / 2019
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Press
About
Darrel Ellis (1958-1992), a New York-based mixed media artist, discovered a cache of photographs from the 1950s by his father Thomas Ellis, who suffered a brutal death at the hands of careless police officers a month before Ellis was born. Ellis projected, reworked and re-photographed them into paintings or drawings creating and exploring identity within the family dynamic and seeming to rewrite the familial narrative as a kind of self-therapy. Ellis was a gifted New York based artist of color who worked in photography, painting and sculptural until his life was cut short at the age of 33 by AIDS. He attended high school in the Bronx, worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, was PS1 artist-in-residence and Whitney ISP student. Darrel Ellis’s work gained national attention when it was seen in the landmark exhibition, Witnesses: Against Their Vanishing, curated by Nan Goldin in 1989 at Artists Space. Witnesses became a rallying cry against censorship when the NEA withdrew funding because of a catalogue essay by David Wojnarowicz. And it was Ellis’ self-portrait (based on a photograph of Ellis by Robert Mapplethorpe) that became the publicity picture most widely used and appearing with articles in The New York Times and Art in America, among many others.
He first received major public exposure in 1992 with his inclusion in New Photography 8 at The Museum of Modern Art, curated by Peter Galassi, which occurred one year after his first solo show at the gallery Baron/Boisante on 57th St. The MoMA show took place several months after Ellis' death in 1992. A major retrospective of Ellis' work was mounted in 1997 at Art in General, curated by the artist Allan Frame. In 2019, OSMOS presented a survey of Darrel Ellis’ oeuvre, including the lesser-known but brilliant drawings and paintings from photography.