Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

During his short career, Bronx-born Darrel Ellis (1958-1992) created a multifaceted and expansive body of work merging painting, printmaking, photography, and drawing before his premature death due to AIDS-related causes. Ellis's greatest achievement happened in his early twenties, when he was given a group of negatives shot by his father, a postal worker and studio photographer who died in police custody shortly before Ellis was born. The younger Ellis's unique studio practice involved projecting these photographic negatives onto a sculpted surface, masking out areas, and re-photographing them, generating a stream of surrogates that capture the fleeting effects of memory and the experience of disillusion. Ellis's technical and theoretical experimentation transformed contemporary serial and appropriation practices into something unrecognizably new, beautiful and compellingly heartfelt.

Darrel Ellis: Regeneration offers the first comprehensive, scholarly survey of Ellis's practice and includes essays by the curators with added contributions by Makeda Djata Best, Allen Frame, Scott Homolka, Linda Owen and Kyle Croft.

Reviews

Through the vigilance of curators, artist-friends and family, his work is very much with us and permanently visible in this lovingly conceived book, the catalog for a traveling survey.--Holland Cotter "The New York Times: Arts"
In his son's hands, Thomas Ellis' photographs become visual metaphors laden with poignancy and need.--Miss Rosen "AnOther"
Rediscovery isn't as simple as it might seem...It may have taken thirty years, but the slight has finally been amended, and there's no feeling like watching art history rewritten before your eyes.--Max Pearl "Aperture"

Author Bio

Antonio Sergio Bessa is chief curator emeritus at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions on themes related to text-based art, and has published essays on concrete poetry.

Leslie Cozzi is is the Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the museum's post-1900 collection of works on paper.