Book Launch: Darrel Ellis

Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) was a mixed-media artist known for his experimental approach to painting and photography, exploring the relation between surface, memory, and lyric self-representation. As a budding artist, Ellis discovered an archive of photographs made by his late father, who died tragically at the hands of the police only a month prior to Ellis’s birth. These images—snapshots of his father’s life in Harlem and the Bronx during the 1950s—provided a connection to the man he never had the chance to meet.

Over the next ten years Ellis turned to these photographs for inspiration and transformed them through projection, deconstruction, and repetition. Ellis’s depictions of family members both living and deceased are odes to time immemorial and the notion of how we come to know ourselves through desire and distortion. His commitment to the self-portrait was no less inspired, particularly after his experiences of being photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. Ellis used these portraits as material for his own paintings in creative acts of representational reclamation. Ellis was on the cusp of major recognition when his life was cut short by AIDS at the age of thirty-three.

About the Book

Darrel Ellis includes over 80 plates that chart Ellis’s development from figurative painting to photographic experimentation and his later interest in self portraiture. Essays by Derek Conrad Murray, Steven G. Fullwood and Tiana Reid offer critical perspectives on the work, and artists Sadie Barnette, Alanna Fields, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflect with Ariel Goldberg on the enduring resonance of Ellis’ images. A richly illustrated chronology, featuring never before seen excerpts from the artist’s journals and an examination of the artist’s unique photographic process provide new insights into Ellis’ life and work.

The book is available on the Visual AIDS store ($49.95).

Speaker Biographies

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer. Since 1992, he has cared for Darrel Ellis’s artwork, working with Ellis's siblings to steward the estate. His book of color photographs from 1981, Fever, which includes pictures of Darrel Ellis, was published this year by Matte Editions

Alanna Fields is an American mixed-media artist whose work investigates and challenges representations of Black queer identity and history through the lens of photography.

This program was funded in part by Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visual AIDS is grateful to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for providing a multiyear grant in support of our publications and to Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund for additional support of this book.