Among the works on view will be Masquerade, Portrait of W.H, a portrait of the artist’s longtime friend Wendell Headley, an artist who gathers old clothes and reconstructs them to create elaborate outfits for himself. The work is part of Daze’s Time Square Series, vibrant and sometimes fantastical portraits that bring together both iconic and oftentimes overlooked aspects of Times Square. Also on view will be works that subtly respond to the current political climate, such as Jackson Heights, a new painting that depicts the Queens neighborhood, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in all of New York City. Within a small radius, a number of different cultural backgrounds live side by side, reflecting what Daze describes as “the antithesis of everything Trump has come to symbolize so far.”

Chris Daze Ellis (b.1962) lives and works in New York City. He is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of the City of New York; The Groninger Museum, Netherlands; and The Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungry. In 2015 he was the subject of the solo exhibition The City is My Muse at the Museum of the City of New York, and in 2014 the exhibition Street Talk: Chris Daze Ellis in Dialogue with the Collection was on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. He has been included in solo exhibitions around the world, including in Europe, Asia, South America, and throughout the U.S. His work has been exhibited in commercial and alternative galleries around the world since 1981, including at: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Grand Palais, Paris; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Edgewood Gallery at Yale University, New Haven, CT; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and the Foundation Cartier, Paris, among many others. In 2015 Schiffer Books published Dazeworld: The Artwork of Chris Daze Ellis.