A new exhibition at the Bronx Museum of Art is a homecoming of sorts for Darrel Ellis, the late African-American artist born in the Bronx in 1958. Ellis’s life was touched by tragedy from the start. Months before he was born, his father was beaten to death by drunk police officers. The impact of his father’s absence was profound, and especially visible in Ellis’s art. A mixture of photos, paintings, prints, and combinations of the three, Ellis’s oeuvre pulls from a trove of his father’s old negatives, images that captured family life. Ellis would manipulate the images in various ways until they were warped and in some cases disturbing. “When I look at those photographs sometimes all I see are holes,” the artist said in his only known interview. “I guess because it reflects a truth or reality, that search for wholeness and completeness, but it doesn’t exist.” Ellis was still relatively unknown when he died in 1992 of AIDS-related causes. He was only 33, the same age his father had been when he died. —Paulina Prosnitz