Janiva Ellis
Janiva Ellis, Lethargy Festival, 2023, oil on canvas, 94 ½ × 191 inches (240.03 × 485.14 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Mark Blower.
Janiva Ellis, Listen to the Soul Warrior, 2023, oil on canvas, 86 ½ × 70 ⅛ × 1 ¼ in (219.71 × 178.12 × 3.18 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Mark Blower.
Janiva Ellis, Moot Unity, 2023, oil on canvas, 76 × 76 × 1 ¼ in (193.04 × 193.04 × 3. 18 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Mark Blower.
Janiva Ellis, You're scaring me, 2023, oil on canvas, 76 × 76 ×1 ¼ in (193.04 × 193.04 × 3.18 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Mark Blower.
Janiva Ellis, Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet, 2019, oil on canvas,108 × 240 in (274.32 × 609.60 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Janiva Ellis, Fair Enough, 2021, oil on linen, 98 × 77 in (248.92 × 195.58 cm). Image courtesy of 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Dawn Blackman.
Janiva Ellis, The Alleyest Oop, 2021, oil on linen, 98 × 77 in (248.92 × 195.58 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, ICA Miami, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Zachary Balber
Janiva Ellis, Plaguing in my Face, 2021, oil on linen, 60 × 48 in (152.40 × 121.92 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, ICA Miami, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Zachary Balber.
Janiva Ellis, The Angels, 2022, oil on canvas, 96 × 393 in (243.84 × 998.22 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Charles White.
Janiva Ellis, Nectar Troth, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 in (152.40 × 121.92 cm). Image courtesy of the artist, ICA Miami, and 47 Canal, New York. Photo: Zachary Balber
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.
