5 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now

Rowan Renee’s new installation; Darrel Ellis’s self-portraits; Lu Yang’s digital world; Kunle Martins’s charcoal portraits; and Keltie Ferris’s exuberant abstractions.

Of the 44 artists featured in the 2020 exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” at MoMA PS1, most produced work while serving prison sentences. Rowan Renee was an exception. Renee, who identifies as genderqueer and uses nonbinary pronouns, is the child of a prisoner. Their father was a convicted pedophile who died in jail, and Renee’s installation, “No Spirit for Me,” consisted almost entirely of related court and police legal documents that the artist had painstakingly recomposed as lithographs on handwoven fabric panels. Together the panels revealed the official history of one crime, but only hinted at the history of another, namely the abuse Renee had experienced as a child at their father’s hands. A new installation at Five Myles, “That Day, We Looked Happy,” takes up that personal history. At the center of the piece are, again, woven documents, in this case family letters Renee inherited after their father’s death. But primary documentary material here is photographic: scrapbook snapshots of Renee’s father seen posing with wife and child. Some of the photographs have been altered by the artist, cut up or stained. Most have been embedded in frames of molten glass, making them look like relics of a cosmic meltdown. Where the earlier installation was unrelentingly sepulchral, this one has, in the snapshots and glass, spots of color and light. It continues this artist’s labor-intensive address of personal trauma with a new, complicated mix of compassion, bitterness and regret. HOLLAND COTTER Darrel Ellis grew up in the Bronx without his father, an amateur photographer who was killed by the police not long before Darrel was born. But when Darrel was 20, his mother gave him an archive of his father’s family photos. He spent the next 13 years, until his death of AIDS at the age of 33 in 1992, examining them, as if searching for the key to a lost connection. He copied them with ink and brush, and he rephotographed them, sometimes altering them first by projecting the negatives onto little ziggurats of plaster.