Please Stay Home: Darrel Ellis in Dialogue with Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan

Centered on a less recognized body of Ellis’s work and featuring new commissions by Hewitt and Milan, Please Stay Home is guest-curated by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums.

Through a groundbreaking experimental art practice that fluidly merged painting, printmaking, and photography, Bronx-born artist Darrel Ellis’s (1958-1992) work engages intergenerational memory, photographic practice, representation, and place. Ellis is known for his unusual technique that involved photographing images projected by an enlarger and introducing sculptural objects into the picture plane. The resulting works convey a sense of perpetually uncertainty and yet visceral tactility. Please Stay Home will pair Ellis with artists Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977) and Wardell Milan (b. 1977), who will create new work responding to his practice. The untimely death of Ellis at age 33 of AIDS-related causes cut short the career of a visionary artist, who is finally being recognized as a forerunner to key contemporary interests in appropriation, re-photography, and intersections between photography and sculpture. For nearly 30 years, Ellis’s friend the artist, curator and writer Allen Frame archived and preserved the Ellis archive in consultation with his family. This exhibition focuses specifically on his interiors – scenes that feature his mother, sister, and extended family members, as well as places he only knew through photographs. These intimate scenes invite us to consider the role of the family archive, self-expression, photography’s social and cultural contexts, and impact on the formation of Black identities. Artists Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan will debut newly commissioned projects made in dialog with Ellis’s life and work.

Taking its title from a text Ellis inscribed on one of his drawings, Please Stay Home foregrounds Ellis’ prescient vision. Ellis’s formal experiments engaged a multiplicity of mediums, and through the themes of family history, identity, and loss, and proposed an expanded definition of photographic practice. He spent much of his short career creating works that reinterpreted the archive of images made by his father, Thomas Ellis, who ran a small photography studio. The elder Ellis was tragically killed the year Ellis was born.

Responding to Ellis’s artistic legacy, the work of New York-based artists Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan similarly demonstrate a commitment to craft and materiality, explore multimedia and experimental approaches, and utilize the visual culture of the everyday.

Leslie Hewitt integrates photography, film, and sculpture. Drawing from personal and family archives, as well as various Black literary and popular-culture ephemera, Hewitt’s works use family pictures, books, and vintage magazines as material and subject matter. The resulting assemblage of photographic objects oscillates fluidly between intimate and sociopolitical histories.

Best known for his works on paper that merge mediums such as drawing and painting with a photographic sensibility, Wardell Milan explores representations of vulnerable and marginalized bodies, the personal “self” in relation to shifting notions of beauty and gender. Such themes are explored within the artist’s incorporation of pop cultural imagery from the worlds of body modification, sport culture, pornography, and fashion—identities constantly produced and re-produced by the organs of mass media.

A series of photographs of Darrel Ellis himself by photographer, writer, and director Allen Frame are also included in Please Stay Home. Self-described as an archivist of his time, Frame captured snapshots of queer subcultures throughout New York City during the 1980s. During this time Frame and Ellis met and developed a close relationship. These documents of Ellis in his daily life, alongside the Apartment paintings, provide another intimate lens-perspective of the artist who grappled with how to represent his own identity and history.