Janiva Ellis

Janiva Ellis (born 1987 in Oakland, California) is an American painter whose psychologically charged compositions combine figuration, abstraction, landscape, caricature, and appropriated imagery to examine Blackness, race, violence, desire, fantasy, and the ideological structures embedded within Western visual culture. Working primarily in oil on canvas and linen, Ellis constructs densely layered scenes in which recognizable bodies, cartoon figures, art-historical references, fragmented landscapes, and abstract passages collide, producing images that resist straightforward narrative or resolution.  Born in Oakland and raised partly in Hawaiʻi, including Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, Ellis has discussed the complexity of growing up Black and biracial within environments where Black communities were relatively small. These experiences inform a practice concerned with the psychic and social effects of racial difference, belonging, isolation, and representation. Her paintings frequently center Black figures while examining the broader visual systems that have historically distorted, excluded, sentimentalized, or mythologized Black life.  Ellis draws extensively from Western painting, Romantic landscape, religious imagery, film, television, animation, cartoons, popular culture, and contemporary events. Rather than simply quoting these sources, she disrupts their familiar meanings, exposing what she identifies as the erasures and violence underlying cultural canonization. Humor, distortion, speed, visual interruption, and moments of apparent incompletion allow her to move between critique and imaginative release. Her recent paintings increasingly investigate ruins, collapsing cultural myths, aspiration, failure, and the possibility of making new images from inherited structures that no longer hold.  Ellis earned a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2012. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Kunsthalle Basel, Dallas Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1. In 2026, Kunsthalle Basel presented Geneva, her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, while MoMA PS1 included her work in Greater New York 2026. Ellis lives and works in New York.