Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) was engaged in a lifelong love affair with history, from the European nineteenth and twentieth century paintings that he meticulously studied on visits to the MoMA and the Met to the 1950s negatives he inherited from his photographer father. But like any love affair, this one did not come without quarrels. Traveling from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Darrel Ellis: Regeneration at the Bronx Museum is the first major museum exhibition of Ellis’s work. Expanded to triple the size of the previous venue in his birthplace, the Bronx Museum installation presents nearly two hundred works on paper, paintings, photographs, and archival material. It is an impressively comprehensive survey of Ellis’s oeuvre.

Early on in his development as an artist, Ellis took inspiration from painters such as Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard—artists that, like him, often depicted intimate settings in domestic and interior spaces. Yet he was also painfully aware that he was attracted to a history that had left him out. The more he matured as a queer Black artist moving through a homophobic, white artworld, the more self-conscious he became of his early interests. In a 1991 interview with David Hirsch, he noted: “I grew up loving the European history of art. It’s my true love, my education, my background, and that’s where so much of my feeling about art and being an artist came from. […] I’m a little embarrassed because I’m supposed to be so Black and everything. Not embarrassed, but that’s a reality, and it’s a very European one.”¹

Spanning from 1979 to 1992, the works in the current exhibition were primarily executed in a monochrome palette, using materials such as acrylic and charcoal, pen and brush, and black ink and wash. While initially committed to painting, Ellis turned to photography after his mother entrusted him with hundreds of negatives left behind by his father, Thomas Ellis. Ellis never knew his father, who had been murdered by the police before Ellis was born. The negatives would form the foundation for Ellis’s practice going forward, as the artist developed a creative process that consisted of projecting his father’s negatives onto irregular surfaces, often sculptural, and then manipulating the surface and re-photographing the projection. While this created the illusion that Ellis had cut into the source image, he actually kept his father’s negatives entirely intact, both challenging and respecting the history they represent. The wholeness of the family structure, however, is decisively disrupted by Ellis’s process. This is not only an inherently queer gesture, but also a commentary on the police brutality that Ellis’s family experienced. As Ellis writes in one of his notebooks, quoted in the exhibition’s catalogue: “The hole is there instead of a normal whole image of family to signify the present condition of the family (fragmented). Not whole. It is impossible presently to try to show a whole—a ‘normal’ reality, since it does not exist.”²

Ellis found out he was HIV-positive around the same time that Nan Goldin included him in the iconic exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing in 1989, presenting queer artists’ responses to the AIDS crisis. As Allen Frame, a close friend of the artist who safe-guarded much of Ellis’s work, writes in his catalogue essay, Ellis’s heightened sense of mortality was palpable. To Goldin’s show, Ellis contributed two painted responses to photographs Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe had made of him; both artists had died within the preceding two years (1987 and 1989, respectively). As is the case with most queer artists of the period, Ellis’s work is imbued with a profound melancholia, reflecting on a disappearing past and a diminishing future.

This sentiment was shared by nearly every queer artist living in New York during this period, resulting in a tight community of friends and lovers, a queer family structure. This community has been brought together in Luxe, Calme, Volupté, a group show at Candice Madey Gallery that Allen Frame co-curated with Bronx Museum curator Antonio Sergio Bessa. Well timed to complement and expand on the museum retrospective, this summer show brings together over seventy artists, including Martin Wong, Agosto Machado, Tabboo!, Nicole Eisenman, and Siobhan Liddell. The title, taken from a 1904 Henri Matisse painting depicting a summer scene, evokes both Ellis’s love for European art history, and the utopian promise queer worldbuilding still holds.

From 1976 to 1990, Ellis kept a record of his life and artistic process in a series of notebooks, a selection of which is on view at the Bronx Museum. As much as queer artists were witnesses to each other’s lives through representations and references, these notebooks demonstrate Ellis’s desire to also be a witness to his own. The current exhibition offers a space for Ellis’s archive to unfold and breathe, allowing visitors the privilege of walking through a life regenerated.

1. Interview with Darrel Ellis by David Hirsch in Darrel Ellis, published by Visual AIDS: New York, 2021, 34
2. Darrel Ellis Bronx Museum Catalogue, page 110