Janiva Ellis: Rats

Janiva Ellis' first monograph explores abstraction, figuration, race, and social acceleration, featuring new paintings created over the past year. Her works comment on white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force, using figuration to paint Blackness expansively.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 02 June 2022
Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers

Janiva Ellis' first monograph, "Rats," explores abstraction, figuration, race, and social acceleration. Published with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the volume introduces Ellis' work, which was featured in the New Museum Triennial 2018 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. The book showcases a suite of new paintings created over the past year, and it accompanies Ellis' first solo museum exhibition. Ellis' paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works produce abundant imagery, both invented and appropriated, and she draws from a broad array of material, including art history and pop culture, to comment on the insidious nature of white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force. The humor in her work aims to create space for release as well as renewal. Ellis uses figuration to paint Blackness expansively, communicating the complexity of navigating such a lopsided and violent landscape.

Weight: 1046g
Dimension: 234 x 280 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781636810263