Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

Living and creating in New York City in the 1980s, Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) anticipated current artistic interest in appropriation, archives, and personal narrative. He was an innovative artist who, through his multifaceted work, examined domestic life, selfhood, and stereotypes of Black masculinity. By the time of his death at age 33 from AIDS-related causes, Ellis had created a highly original body of work.

Darrel Ellis: Regeneration is the first major museum exhibition featuring the full breadth of Ellis’s moving work, which encompasses photography, painting, printmaking, and drawing. Photographs made by his father, a postal clerk and studio photographer who died before Ellis was born, were key among his source material. A student of art history, Ellis set the family scenes his father recorded in dialogue with paintings of Pierre Bonnard and other 19th-century artists he admired. Through his father’s negatives, Ellis, in his words, “investigat[ed] the sensibility of a man who was lost to me” and witnessed the life beloved relatives shared before he knew them.

In a later series of self-portraits, Ellis responded to images photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Allen Frame made of him. These self-portraits “after” other photographers, and a complementary set based on Ellis’s own negatives, offer an intimate perspective on identity and an artist whose life and career were cut short.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum of the Arts.