Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

Co-organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum.

As moving as it is complex, the multifaceted work of Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) restages a lost vision of Black selfhood and domesticity. His oeuvre has presented a formidable challenge to curators and scholars over the last thirty years for its unfinished tenor, a perception heightened by his untimely death due to AIDS-related causes at age 33. Although Ellis’ work was included in important contemporary surveys during his lifetime, including the 1989 exhibition Witnesses: Against Their Vanishing, organized by Nan Goldin, only now is it beginning to garner the attention it deserves. The exhibition Darrel Ellis: Regeneration offers the first comprehensive, scholarly survey of this pioneering artist, whose highly original merging of painting, printmaking, and photography anticipated current artistic interest in archive, appropriation, and personal narrative.