When Milwaukee Art Museum opens “Darrel Ellis: Regeneration,” on Friday, it will mark the first major museum show exploring the photography, painting, printmaking and drawings of the Bronx-born artist, who died in 1992 at age 33.
The show, which opens Oct. 20 and runs through Jan. 14, is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. It hangs in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts on the museum’s lower level.
Each of the three institutions has a slightly different version of the show, according to Ariel Pate, the museum's assistant curator of photography.
There were nearly 200 works on view in the Bronx, but only about 55 in Baltimore.
"We are at a sweet spot of like 100 artworks and then like 20 to 25 pieces of ephemera," Pate says. "So it's a nice scale."
But smaller doesn't mean less powerful.
There are a number of really interesting series of works in the show as Ellis often took a single image and riffed on it in a number of ways, exploring its visual and contextual possibilities in photographs, drawings, paintings and multi-media works.
"Darrel created a body of work that really is centered in photography and used photography to think about memory, think about family, think about how he was perceived, and how he perceived himself," says Pate. "He always used photography as sort of the linchpin for all these other ideas, but yet worked across many media.
"There are so many things represented here. There are ink drawings, ink wash drawings, there are sort of mixed media where it's ink and then chalk. There are photographs of varying sizes. There are photographs that have been distorted. There are drawings that seem fairly faithful, and then he is using the same image that distorted. There's also experimentation with color on top of the photographs. He's really playing with all these different media and all these things."
For reasons I won't bore you with here, I've been thinking a lot lately about art process and so the arrival of Ellis' show here is perfectly timed, as he was deeply into exploring process.
At the beginning of the show is a camera set up to shoot an image being projected by a photo enlarger onto a contoured mass of plaster, because it's one of the ways that Ellis created his unique photographs.
In this digital era, says Pate, it's important to explain some of Ellis' methodology.
"It's interesting to present this work now because I think we might look at this image or that image and think, 'oh, that's digitally manipulated. That's so easy to do in Photoshop.' It just feels digital in this way," Pate notes.
But Ellis did not have these tools at his disposal.
"We've started the exhibition with a studio recreation of Darrel's working process," Pate explains. "So visitors, when they come to exhibition, the first thing they see is this setup, which recreates how Darrel created work.
"There was a lot of steps and translation happening. (Because) we're really conversant in digital processes (now), this is something that we felt it was really important to break down for people. Otherwise, you look at the work and you're like, 'well, whatever.' But, he was really making a lot of decisions along the way."
It's fascinating to see how Ellis took a single image and ran with it. Often that image was one taken by his father Thomas, who was killed by police a few months before Darrel's birth.
In the show we might see the original photograph, in addition to diary entries with ideas and thoughts on it, ink drawings based on it, paintings that riff on it, newly manipulated photographic prints of it.
Each of these works feel special but together they take on a much larger significance.
Many of the images show domestic spaces and Ellis' family.
"He said in 1991 interview, 'I grew up loving the European history of art. Bonnard can paint his wife at the kitchen table. This is natural to me to do because I've always felt that that was the subject matter, the people I was around, my family'," says Pate.
"So he is sort of translating what he's seen in the Museum of Modern Art. Pierre Bonnard painting his wife in the bathtub, or, Edouard Vuillard painting a sort of peaceful domestic scene at the breakfast table.
"He's taking that into his own life and using that to create images. He's photographing it, he's making drawings of it and then he's translating those photographs into these incredible, paintings and other work. I just love that he's adapting those scenes in European art history and bringing them to his own life in this way."
Ellis – who died of AIDS-related causes – also turned the camera on himself and created works based on photographs of him taken by others, looking at who he was, how he was viewed by others, especially as a gay Black man during the AIDS epidemic.
These, for me, are the most powerful works.
Especially a pair of self portraits painted from photographs of Ellis by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom also died of AIDS-related causes before Ellis' passing.
At times endearing, at times charming, at times almost brutally frank and honest and searching, the pieces in this show are a revelation for those who don't know Ellis' work.
And that's a lot of folks.
Although Ellis and his work gained some attention in the 1980s and ‘90s, it hasn’t been seen as much since. This show – the first museum-organized monographic exhibition of the artist’s oeuvre – aims to change that.
“This significant exhibition offers an opportunity to look closely at Ellis’s distinctive studio practice and understand how he thoughtfully transformed photographs taken by himself and others to create profoundly deep and personal works,” says Pate.
But it's also much more.
"This is probably the last time these works will be (see) all together, because he's really getting recognition," Pate adds.
"He's getting written up big major art publications. This is kind of the last time that people can come and really appreciate the breadth of his work and other questions."
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue and a range of related events, including a weekend's worth of World AIDS Day-related programming.
You can find information on all of it at mam.org/exhibitions/darrel-ellis.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He can be heard weekly on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories.
