Janiva Ellis

Opening Reception
Thursday, January 30, 2025 
Details to be announced Fall 2024

The Carpenter Center will present an exhibition by Janiva Ellis (b.1987) which will include a newly commissioned series of paintings. Ellis’s paintings reconfigure a broad array of material, including art historical pictorial conventions of portraiture and landscape, animation, and pop culture. Unsettling, hallucinatory, and by turns explicit and obscuring, her paintings narrativize white supremacist mythology and its concomitant denial as brutal and nuanced structural forces. With a dexterous and knowing ability to employ a wide variety of painting techniques and motifs, Ellis’s work goes beyond exposing cultural constructions to manipulate their sentimental resonances. Ellis creates space for release as well as renewal.   

Janiva Ellis (b. 1987, Oakland, California) lives and works in New York City. Solo exhibitions include “Sussudio Pseudo Soothe,” Cabinet Gallery, UK (2024); “Hammer Projects: Janiva Ellis,” the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2023); “Rats,” The Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami (2021), and “Tip Drill,” 47 Canal, New York (2019). She has participated in group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); and the New Museum Triennial, New York (2018); as well as a two-person exhibition with Donald Rodney at Arcadia Missa, London (2022). In 2018, Ellis was the recipient of the Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and the Stanley Hollander Award. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rubell Museum, Miami; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; the Dallas Museum of Art; Dallas; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.