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Contemporary artists Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan created pieces responding to Ellis’s work for the show. Milan said Ellis was “making work during that time when not only the gay community but also the Black community were even more marginalized than they are now.” He was “part of both of those communities in New York City when the AIDS crisis was just beginning, and these communities were dealing with devastation of that.”
Wardell Milan, “The Edge of Town: Hollywood Hills,” 2021. Charcoal, graphite, oil pastel, colored pencil, pastel, yupo paper, cut and pasted paper on inkjet print.
Image courtesy of the artist and David Nolan Gallery
Since the murder of George Floyd and the global Black Lives Matters protests, Ellis’s work has new resonance, said Best. “Through small exhibitions and a major touring retrospective, Ellis’s work is finally gaining widespread attention. I feel like the work is just more meaningful now.”
To provide a personal, political, and historical context, the show includes ephemera as well as photos by the artist’s father, Thomas Ellis, and photographs of Ellis by his friend Allen Frame. This allows viewers insight into “the ways in which Ellis is thinking about his identity as a Black gay man, and the way his family and their community lived and the lifestyle that he sees in the pictures his father made versus the world that he was growing up in,” said Best.