CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/13/2022

'Darrel Ellis' explores the "beautiful and often tragic pageantry of everyday life"

“Untitled” (Self-Portrait, ca. 1981–85) is reproduced from Darrel Ellis, the enlightening new release from Visual AIDS, New York. The first monograph ever published on the artist, who died at just thirty-three years old in 1992, it’s one of our staff favorite new discoveries of 2022. “There is something incredibly powerful in Darrel Ellis’s ability to explore the beautiful and often tragic pageantry of everyday life,” Derek Conrad Murray writes. “Despite the volatility of his time, reflected in structural racism, an anti-gay legal culture, and the terrifying realities of AIDS, Ellis managed to turn inward, to tap into the inner workings, longings, joys, and forms of loss experienced by families. In many respects, these are the most universal and distinctly human themes one could explore: a kind of visual sympathy with the human banalities that bind us.”