DAZE

Chris Ellis, who has written as DAZE since the mid-1970s, was born in New York in 1962 and began painting subway cars while still at the High School of Art and Design. He belongs to the second generation of New York writers — those who inherited a fully formed practice and pushed it toward painting. His first group exhibition was Beyond Words at the Mudd Club in 1981; his first solo show followed at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx.

Where much graffiti-derived painting stays with the letter, Daze went early and decisively toward the figure. The paintings are populated: subway riders, boxers, dancers, street vendors, children, crowds at Coney Island. He works in oil, acrylic and spray paint together, often on large canvases, building scenes that carry the compression and speed of aerosol handling into something closer to social realism. The lettering survives as texture and atmosphere rather than as subject.

The city is the constant. Not the skyline but the level of the platform and the sidewalk — the specific geography of Jackson Heights, Chambers Street, the Bronx, Coney Island, named in his titles and painted from long familiarity. The work has an elegiac quality that has grown more pronounced with time, recording a New York that has largely been replaced, without sentimentalising it.

Daze has held solo exhibitions at the Palais Liechtenstein in Austria, the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice, the Museum of the City of New York, the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, and shows with P·P·O·W in New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at P.S.1, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Drawing Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

He held residencies at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2014 and Yale University Art Gallery in 2015, and received a smART power grant from the United States Department of State in 2011. In 2025 the Museum of the City of New York and the Olayan Group commissioned Above Ground Midtown, a large-scale mural project at 550 Madison Avenue. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, Yale University Art Gallery, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest and the Groninger Museum.

SELECTED CV

Born 1962, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2026 Orchid Rain on the Underground, P·P·O·W, New York, NY, USA

2025 Dark Green Daze, Dark Green Studios, Ibiza, Spain

2023 People and Places, Sevil Dolmacı, Istanbul, Turkey

2022 Give It All You Got, P·P·O·W, New York, NY, USA

2019 Seasons, Galleria del Palazzo, Florence, Italy

2018 Daily Commute, P·P·O·W, New York, NY, USA

1982 DAZE, Fashion Moda, Bronx, NY, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

1984 CRASH & DAZE, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1981 Beyond Words, Mudd Club, New York, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2025 Graffiti, Museion, Bolzano, Italy

2024 The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, USA

2024 Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

2023 Beyond the Streets, Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2020 Next Wave (solo), Institut Catholique de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

2015 The City Is My Muse (solo), Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

2015 Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

2014 Street Talk (solo), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, USA

2011 Art in the Streets, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2006 Graffiti, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

2004 East Village USA, New Museum, New York, NY, USA

1999 American Graffiti: CRASH & DAZE, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France

1999 CRASH and DAZE: On the Express Train 1977–1999, Palais Liechtenstein, Feldkirch, Austria

1984 The New Portrait, P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, USA

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2024 Art SG, Singapore

2022 EXPO Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

2017 Frieze New York, New York, NY, USA

Awards, Honours and Residencies

2016 Artist in Residence, Jardin Rouge, Marrakech, Morocco

2015 Artist in Residence, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, USA

2014 Edward E. Elson Artist in Residence, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, USA

2011 smART power grant, United States Department of State

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2025 Above Ground Midtown: MCNY x DAZE, Museum of the City of New York and the Olayan Group, 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA

2016 Coney Island Art Walls, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, USA

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, USA

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, USA

Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary

Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

Selected Publications and Monographs

2025 Chris Daze Ellis: People and Places, Sevil Dolmacı, Istanbul

2016 DazeWorld, Schiffer Publishing