Chris "Daze" Ellis

Artist whose Coney Island-themed work includes solo and community murals at Coney Art Walls

Interviewer:
Interviewee:
Chris "Daze" Ellis
Interview Date:
August 28, 2017

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Brooklyn-born Chris "Daze" Ellis is an internationally known artist who began his career painting subway trains as a high school student and successfully transitioned to canvas in the early 1980s. His series of Coney Island-themed paintings created in the 1990s including Coney Island Pier and Kiddyland Spirits have been exhibited widely in museums. Daze describes these works, as well as his solo and community walls, which are currently part of Coney Art Walls, an outdoor museum of street art, and his first Coney Island wall for Creative Time in 2004. Growing up in Crown Heights in the 1970s, he visited Coney Island with his parents, who shared their memories of coming here in the 1930s and '40s. He remains drawn to Coney Island as "one of the few distinctly New York places that we still have left."