Groundbreaking American artist Darrel Ellis worked across a range of media including drawing, painting, and experimental photography. Born months after the murder of his father at the hands of two plainclothes police officers, their relationship was restricted to the photos found in his father’s archive, some of which Ellis incorporated into his own work. Ellis’s portraits discard likeness, using photographs as a starting point from which he would deconstruct, cast projections, re-photograph, and paint, among other techniques to reimage his family history. Through this, Ellis’s works represent the experience of memories lived via the artifacts of others, enabling his subjects to resist the limits of oppression and death itself.

–Emily Nicole Rader, from the Glenstone Field Guide