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“And people don’t know how to react to you a lot of times, as a Black artist, they don’t know how to react to your work. “There's so much racism naturally in the art world,” he said.
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He told the interviewer, David Hirsh, that he was never one to harp on the subject of his Blackness. The only known recording of Ellis is an interview, conducted for the gay biweekly newspaper New York Native, less than a year before he died. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Darrel Ellis Estate, Courtesy Candice Madey, New York and Visual AIDS. “Self-Portrait after Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe,” 1989. Tellingly, however, he chose to reimagine both Hujar’s and Mapplethorpe’s photographs of him-neither of which he liked-as powerful self-portraits, thereby staking a creative claim to his own image. During his brief career he mounted just a handful of exhibitions, and he gained his only glimpse of wider notoriety as a participant in Nan Goldin’s scandal-causing group exhibition about the AIDS crisis, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” in 1989. Money was always tight, and to make ends meet he held down a job as a security guard at MoMA, which he resented having to do. But unlike some of his peers, who found recognition during their lifetimes or after their deaths, Ellis’s work remained relatively obscure. He circulated in the vibrant downtown scene among fellow-artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, both of whom took his photograph. (A travelling exhibition will have its first stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art, next fall.) As a young artist, Ellis took classes at Cooper Union and attended the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Program. It is only with the publication of a new monograph of Ellis’s work, by the arts organization Visual AIDS, that Ellis is beginning to earn the recognition that he deserves. “Untitled (Father with Camera),” circa 1981–85. He died, of AIDS, in 1992, at just thirty-three years old, the same age his father had been when he was killed. Hartley’s famous adage casts the past as a foreign country Ellis was less a tourist than an expat. Working from prints of Thomas’s pictures, and later from a cache of negatives that his mother gave him, he used that recovered history both as a catchment for his nostalgic fantasies and as a sounding board for his present-day existence.
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A few weeks after his death, the academy called to inform him that he had fulfilled the requirements.) Born in 1958, Ellis made it his life’s work to explore the world in which his father had lived. (In a bitter irony, Thomas had been training to join the police force. But before Ellis was born Thomas was beaten to death by drunken plainclothes policemen on the streets of the family’s South Bronx neighborhood according to Ellis’s sister, an argument had ensued after Thomas asked that the cops move their double-parked car.
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His father, Thomas, was an amateur shutterbug who’d briefly run a professional portrait studio. Photograph by Darrel Ellis, Courtesy Visual AIDS.