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Allison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. A new exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts is one of the first major surveys of the artist Darrel Ellis, whose work faded into obscurity after he died from complications from AIDS in 1992. Darrel Ellis was a local. He was born and raised in the South Bronx. He spent most of his short life in New York City. His life was bookended by tragedy. A few months before he was born, his father Thomas Ellis, a photographer, was shot and killed by plain-clothes police officers. As a kid, Darrel Ellis loved drawing.

As he grew up, he became a well-known figure in the 80s downtown art scene. He was also a dedicated journaler and compiled more than 50 notebooks in a short period, including sketches, short entries, and ideas. His writing is on view as part of this show. The show co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art is called Darrel Ellis: Regeneration. It's on view now at the Bronx Museum and runs through September 10th. Joining me now in studio is Antonio Sergio Bessa, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Antonio, nice to meet you.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: You too.

Allison Stewart: Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Leslie, welcome to the studio.

Leslie Cozzi: Thank you. It's a thrill to be here.

Allison Stewart: Darrel was born and raised in the South Bronx. He would return home for stints to live with his mother and his sister in their apartment. Sergio, where do we see the Bronx in his work? How do we know he is a young man of the Bronx?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: I think you'll see the Bronx in the amazing portrait that he did of his family. That was one of the things that excited me the most to collaborate with Leslie in this exhibition because it's such a beautiful positive picture of a Bronx family. The Bronx is all over. For example, to be very specific, one of the works on view is a series of variations that he did on a photograph of his sister in Cortona Park holding a toy bunny. Cortona Park is just a few blocks away from the Bronx Museum. We can make that kind of connection with the community all the time through his work.

Allison Stewart: Leslie, what did you learn about the Bronx from being part of this project than through his work? What did you get to come to understand about the Bronx, especially the time when he was flourishing?

Leslie Cozzi: Well, I think it's interesting. I think for Ellis, a lot of his work was a meditation on change and thinking about a kind of idyllic post-war image of a family life, of Black life, and domesticity that he didn't actually get to experience because of the loss of his father and the changes that his family suffered. He experienced a lot of alienation and displacement. I think in a sense you experienced the social history of not just the Bronx, but of a large portion of Black America through his work.

Allison Stewart: Sergio, how did Darrel Ellis fit into the wider Bronx art movement of his time?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: It's so interesting, this question. I think it's still a puzzle for all of us, not only Leslie and myself but for all the curators that would come because he was a very odd fit not only in terms of the Bronx but also in terms of downtown New York. You are talking about a period when younger artists who are in graffiti, hip-hop, or they're going into conceptual art and minimalism. Darrel was focusing on his family. His vision, in a sense, is very bourgeois, if you allow me that.

Allison Stewart: Sure.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: That bourgeois sense of French 19th century, which was the period that I think talked to him the most. He was a not fit. Having said that, he was in an exhibition at the Fashion Moda, which was this gallery in South Bronx, run by Joe Lewis and Stefan Eins. It was a hub for all these up-and-coming artists. Like John Ahearn was there. You name it. He was there right at the time, but would people be interested in buying a drawing that he made of his mother? That's the big question.

Allison Stewart: Leslie, when we think about those drawings he made, it notes in the catalog that he's been drawing since he was in elementary school. What was he interested in drawing? How was he drawing? How was he expressing himself artistically as even a child?

Leslie Cozzi: Well, it's interesting because there's a very high brow aspect to his drawing, and then there's a very popular aspect to his drawing. He was teaching himself the history of art through his drawings. He was going to the Met and sketching Tullio Lombardo's, Adam, one of the first freestanding sculptures in the round. He was also interested in fashion illustration. He was interested in pop culture. He was interested in-- at one point in his life, he explored the possibility of doing theater costumes.

He really was thinking through different segments of the world through his drawing. There's a lot about his drawing that is I think also a process of translation. He's drawing from his own photographs. He's drawing from his father's photographs. He's also, I think, thinking about drawing as an act of bridging different media.

Allison Stewart: It's interesting, he went to the High School of Fashion Industries, which was, recently profiled in the New York Times. They called it the Hogwarts of Fashion. [giggles] This unknown, but very influential. I think one of the lines in the article says, "Everybody talks about LaGuardia, but this is one of the best-kept secrets in New York," and how they have these wonderful fashion shows during Fashion Week and around Fashion Week. One of the educators that's quoted in the catalog about Darrel Ellis at this time was-- that most of the students at the school at this time were Black girls.

Darrel was one of the few boys, and he knew he was gay. Leslie, what was his life like as a teenage Black queer aspiring artist in, I think we're talking the '70s at this point?

Leslie Cozzi: The late '70s. I think it's hard to say. I think there were two polls. We've heard different versions of Darrel from different people that knew him. There were people that said how he was really quiet and he was really shy. Then there were people that said, oh, he was the life of the party. I think in some instances there was that sense of being a little bit isolated and not accepted. I think certainly within his community there were struggles with that and even to some degree within his own family.

Then he also became part of an art scene in which queer artists were hugely influential. His work and him personally, I think he was really dear to them. It's an interesting dialectic of integration and isolation.

Allison Stewart: Did you want to add something, Sergio?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Yes. It's exactly what Leslie said, that he was shy or this and that. He was definitely afraid of his mother let's say judgment of his choices. At the same time, you'll see a very courageous young man braven in this newfound kind of a scene. Just to give you a few examples, he met James Wentzy in a gay bar. James Wentzy was a photographer.

Allison Stewart: James Van Der Zee, famous.

Leslie Cozzi: Oh, James Wentzy.

Allison Stewart: Oh, Wentzy.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Wentzy.

Allison Stewart: I thought it was James Van Der Zee.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: No, no, no.

Allison Stewart: I was like, "James Van Der Zee. Oh my goodness." That would be insane.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: It's another period.

Allison Stewart: The math's off.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Together with James, they applied for a studio space at PS1. They got started around the time, which I believe was 1979. He spent two years working at PS1, with James experimenting. A couple of years after that, he is accepted at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He was very geared. It is my opinion, and I hope Leslie will agree. He knew he wanted to do something very big. As you see in the catalog, he was photographed by Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.

He was part of that scene, but at the same time, he didn't want to be seen as that eye candy for photographers that like Hujar and Mapplethorpe. He wanted to show his work on his own way.

Allison Stewart: We are discussing the exhibit Darrel Ellis: Regeneration, which is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts until September 10th. My guests are Antonio Sergio Bessa, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This show is a collaboration between the two institutions. I did want to follow up on something that you mentioned, Leslie. You talked about him going to the various institutions here in the city, the Met, the Whitney, and art students do that.

They go and they draw. It's all very in the '70s still Euro and Anglocentric. Did he express any thoughts about that as he was working on his work, that he was being sent to learn the masters in the master's role, European and white?

Leslie Cozzi: Yes. Absolutely. He was very cognizant of it. He writes in his journals about wanting to think through 19th-century portraiture and domestic scenes and points to specific works that he wants to reference but also talks about that absence and the different valence of painting himself as a Black subject and his family as Black subjects. I think for him, part of his process was an attempt at Canon correction, which is really interesting because I think it anticipates what we're trying to do in the museum today.

[phone ringing]

Alison Stewart: Someone is calling to tell you, you're on the radio.

[laughter]

Leslie Cozzi: Sergio, do you know you're on public radio right now?

Alison Stewart: Continue, Leslie.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: It's them.

Leslie Cozzi: Yes, just that's really the main point that I think he was understanding what those gaps were. In the early '80s and '83, he also worked as an educator at the Whitney Museum of Art in their ARTSReach program. One of the things that we can tell that he did from his journals is really trying to revamp that curriculum to include really significant Black American artists, including James Van Der Zee. I think he was somebody that really understood those absences and then you see those absences physically, visually, formally in the work in all those empty spaces where people's faces are obscured.

Alison Stewart: Sergio, how would you describe his reputation as an artist at the time in real-time?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: At the time, I think he might have been seen as the next big thing that could happen, but it just kept not happening. I think there was the difficulty of facing a system that was mostly white male but also I think there was a lot of self-doubt. You've seen this in the notebooks and also from talking to people that knew at the time. He was plagued with uncertainty about the value of what he was doing. That, I think was a big part of it.

Leslie Cozzi: Yes. Because his work was so different. I think from what his contemporaries were doing. I think in a way a lot of his contemporaries understood and valued his contributions. That's why the work has been saved. That's why that archive still exists. Thanks to people like Allen Frame and others who saved that work. Yes, there was a very different sensibility to that work that I think made him something of an outlier artistically.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: There's also, you know you mentioned previously that his interest in 19th century and going to the Mets and the classics. He was also part of a small group of friends who thought alike like Miguel Ferrando. Who's an artist who also died of AIDS, unfortunately, a few years before Darrel. They were good friends from high school. Miguel was born in New York but from Dominican Republic family. He was Darrel's buddy going to the Met and copying him. I had a chance to go see his work at his sister's house, and it's drawings and drawings of copies of classics from the Met.

Also, Richard [unintelligible 00:14:13], another artist from New York at the time. Very good friend of Darrel. I think all these men they were interested in beauty, which is so interesting. In mastery and scale, which in the '70s and '80s, it was being decried as bad. Everyone was going to copy or photographs or draw from theory and things like that. Darrel was interested in the craft in making things.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I want to circle back to a little bit of biography, Leslie. As I mentioned, his father a photographer, was shot and killed by plainclothes police. Do we know the circumstance?

Leslie Cozzi: I think from what I understand from his family, I think he was beaten to death, in a kind of traffic-related altercation by plainclothes police officers. In addition to the tragedy of it, one of the great ironies was that he had just been accepted into the police academy. There's some really interesting imagery in the exhibition around men in uniform. Darrel's father had also been a Marine, many men in their family were police officers or had served in the armed forces. There's a really sad aspect to a family that had this tradition of service, and the intention of continuing it.

Then, having that whole life destroyed by a kind of obscene and just unnecessary act of violence.

Alison Stewart: His mother gives him many of his father's photographs. Why was this an important moment in his artistic career?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Oh, it's pivotal. It's an amazing moment. I believe that, Leslie can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was when he entered the Whitney Independent Study Program. I think she saw that he wanted to pursue art. When he saw the archives of photographs and negatives, he rediscovered the family that he hadn't known. If you can report to that period in his life, he grew up in grief. His mother was probably extremely depressed, a very strong woman by the way who kept the family together throughout all that tragedy.

I think for him to receive the archives of his father and slowly research that, it was not only a discovery in terms of his own work of the visual work that he wanted to do, but also of himself as a person. He also could think of the situations of Black families in your postwar America, and how hard it was to be part of the Big American Dream.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing Darrel Ellis: Regeneration, which is now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. My guests are curators, Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi. Cozzi, why is it called Regeneration? Why is that the right title for this show, Leslie?

Leslie Cozzi: I have to say we owe the credit to one of my colleagues who identified that phrase in Darrel Ellis's interview that he gave in the early '90s. I think 1991, shortly before he died where he talks about his photographs as an act of regeneration. We're drawing on his own words and his hope that the photographs would create that lifeline to a past that he didn't get to experience.

Alison Stewart: It's extraordinary to have these 52 notebooks. Full of information. Sergio, did any certain themes emerge?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Oh, many.

Alison Stewart: Yes. What were some of the themes that emerged?

Antonio Sergio Bessa: First of all, I already mentioned his feeling of doubt about his work or this and that. There is the kind of continuous line of that, but particularly at some point, you'll see him just focusing on his work and what he wants to do with the work and how he's going to do it. I have to say words apart and compare, but it reminds me a little bit of notes by someone like Leonardo DaVinci that was creating some techniques to achieve what you want to achieve. The books are absolutely fabulous.

I have to say that was one of the things that drew me the most to do this exhibition was when I found, oh, well, I didn't find, but when I saw the books, I was just like, "This is amazing." Throughout the books, he criticized what he sees as what's going wrong in the art scene, sort of a formalism for formalism's sake. He is a very formalistic artist, but there is a reason behind the form constantly.

Leslie Cozzi: Yes. There's also, I think, a real spiritual element to the notebooks. The first time there's a notebook from 1983 where he writes, "Do I have AIDS?" He has a very short career. It's sort of Van Gogh like to make another genius comparison. He spends a lot of his career sort of dealing with trauma in terms of his own HIV status and wondering about it. Sergio writes in the catalog essay about his experimentation with the I Ching. He's really looking to Eastern philosophy to try to find answers and perhaps healing. It's a really interesting mix of art and diet and spirituality.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: And books that he needs to read. The books that he needs to read are just amazing. It's like Derrida, and they were just talking about the '80s, or read Derrida, read Carl Jung, and read this. It's a snapshot of a brain bubbling. It's just beautiful.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Darrel Ellis: Regeneration. It is at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It's on view until September 10. My guests have been Antonio Sergio Bessa, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Leslie Cozzi, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was a collaboration between the two institutions. Thank you so much to both of you for coming to the studio. I hope folks get a chance to go to the Bronx and see the show.

Leslie Cozzi: Thank you. Open house tomorrow. Please come.

Alison Stewart: Open house tomorrow. Please go.

Antonio Sergio Bessa: Thank you so much.

Leslie Cozzi: Thank you so much.

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