The Hidden Stories of Third Spaces: Art of Michael Edward Ellison

The Hidden Stories of Third Spaces: Art of Michael Edward Ellison

By Chenoa Baker

Michael Edward Ellison (1952 - 2001) was a printmaker whose work from the 1980s and 1990s transforms ordinary, everyday scenes into visually compelling narratives. He’s known for “Is known for… developing a style of thickly applying layers of ink that create a rich surface texture with bright colors,” according to Swann Auction Galleries. Ellison’s prints capture the rhythms of daily life through tightly framed compositions and anonymous, multicolored figures.

Ellison’s primary subject is not the individual, but the environment they create together, particularly in spaces that fall between public and private, labor and leisure, the sacred and the secular. These are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “third spaces”—gathering places beyond home (first space) and work (second space) that serve as vital grounds for community, identity, and informal social exchange. For Black Americans, these spaces—churches, salons, shopping centers, waiting rooms, and front porches—have long held cultural weight, often functioning as sites of care, resistance, and belonging in the face of exclusion from dominant public spheres.

Through the use of anonymous, multicolored silhouettes, Ellison shifts the viewer’s focus away from individual identity and toward collective gesture, rhythm, and presence. His prints, often resembling candid street photography or film stills, create a sense of immediacy and intimacy, drawing attention to fleeting movement and subtle interaction. This strategy allows him to isolate and elevate the emotional undertones of everyday life, making the mundane feel monumental. Analyzing his work from this period reveals a unique blend of abstraction and realism, underscored by a sensitivity to color, spatial tension, and the politics of visibility.

In Aunt Etta’s Church (1982), vitality radiates from the composition, as if the print itself has been electrified. The stained glass windows appear to burst forth, animated by exaggerated hands and eyes. An abstracted Madonna and Child meet the gazes of both the viewer and the preacher, while another figure, bathed in sunlight and pointing upward, breaks the frame—its gesture extending beyond the window’s border. This subtle color-outside-the-lines device acts as a metaphor, suggesting a dynamic conversation between people and their environment. The preacher’s gesture toward the crowd—rendered in overlapping silhouettes of orange, purple, white, black, and brown—creates a rhythm akin to gospel choir notes, infusing the composition with spiritual warmth and collective vitality. Ellison’s almost cinematic framing immerses us directly into the congregation, emphasizing movement and connection through posture and gesture.

The preacher’s open gesture toward the congregation—rendered in layered silhouettes of orange, purple, white, black, and brown—resembles the rhythmic call-and-response of a gospel choir. Ellison’s composition pulses with collective vitality. Like Romare Bearden before him, Ellison uses fragmentation and flattening not to obscure but to intensify the emotional texture of Black experience. His almost cinematic framing invites viewers into the congregation, emphasizing spiritual movement and connection through posture, color, and gesture. This is not merely a depiction of a Sunday service—it is a visual anthem to the church as a third space: one that uplifts, gathers, and reaffirms communal identity.

While Aunt Etta’s Church foregrounds the collective transcendence of spiritual space, By The Mall shifts to the choreographies of consumerism. Both scenes are transient, yet one aspires upward while the other loops endlessly. Ellison uses gesture—upraised arms in church, striding feet in the mall—to map the pulse of the spaces we inhabit. He captures the dual condition of modern life: the freedom of movement and the flattening effects of consumer space. 

By The Mall (1987), Ellison turns his gaze to a secular, commercial setting. Here, figures blur with mannequins and background elements, evoking the snapshot quality of a fleeting glance. The bodies stride mid-motion, caught in the relentless flow of consumer culture. Though facial features remain indistinct, the varied postures and colors pulse with life. The cropped framing, reminiscent of candid street photography or surveillance footage, heightens the transient nature of the moment. Ellison captures not merely a place but the movement defining it—shoppers are idle yet perpetually in motion. The focus on footwear—flat and high-heeled shoes—grounds the image in physical detail, underscoring both anonymity and individuality.

The Ford Ranch (1989) marks a notable shift in Ellison’s visual focus, from urban and commercial third spaces to a rural, open landscape rendered with quiet yet deliberate grandeur. A dusky purple skyline stretches across the top of the composition, enveloping the scene in a moody, dreamlike atmosphere. The expansive negative space does not simply suggest vastness; it introduces a sense of emotional distance and spatial ambiguity. This is not the idealized pastoral of American Regionalism, though Ellison’s oblique angle and flattened perspective nod to that tradition. Instead, he subverts the genre’s nostalgia by disrupting spatial continuity through disjointed visual planes and a muted, surreal pastel palette. The ranch, often a symbol of Americana, tradition, and self-reliance, becomes here a site of quiet dislocation and transitional labor. While the scene may initially register as a third space—a communal rural environment outside of home or institutional settings—it also functions as a second space, a site of physical work and economic survival. The anonymous figures—reduced to simplified, silhouetted forms—seem caught mid-task, their gestures more emblematic of labor’s repetition than of leisure or communion. Through abstraction and fragmentation, Ellison reframes the rural landscape not as a retreat from modernity but as another contested zone where labor, identity, and memory converge. The painting’s emotional weight lies not in any grand narrative but in its suspended atmosphere, suggesting that even in wide-open spaces, Black life is shaped by movement, endurance, and unresolved tension. In doing so, Ellison continues his exploration of how the environment reflects and shapes communal experience—physically, psychologically, and historically. 

In Flip Flops (1995), Ellison captures leisure with acute sensitivity to both the body and the surface of space. The viewer looks down into the pool from a tilted, almost voyeuristic perspective, as though about to take the plunge themselves. A pair of bright yellow sandals in the bottom left corner stands as a trace of presence—an indexical mark of a recently departed body. But this seemingly quiet image resonates deeply when considered through the material culture of the pool for Black communities. For many Black communities, the pool carries generational trauma and triumph. In the mid-20th century, public pools were frequent sites of segregation; some were even drained if Black children entered. Even after formal integration, swimming facilities remained inaccessible, underfunded, or inhospitable. Within this context, the pool is not just a leisure site but a contested space. Learning to swim became an act of safety, autonomy, and dignity, often encouraged in Black families as both practical knowledge and social empowerment. 

Against this historical backdrop, Ellison’s depiction of a serene, multicolored swimming pool becomes more than just a summer snapshot—it becomes a symbol of reclamation and possibility. The invisible choreography of being at the pool—haircare rituals, skin protection, hygiene, and communal safety—is deeply embedded in Black familial memory and care. Ellison’s work acknowledges these layers. The water's surface fractures the swimmer's body into repeated limbs, evoking movement, fluidity, and multiplicity. The anonymity of the figure resists spectacle, reclaiming leisure as a private, meditative act. Haircare, hygiene, and sunscreen rituals—often necessary negotiations in Black pool culture—are implied through absence. In Flip Flops, Ellison elevates the everyday as a space of reclamation and quiet resistance, where even rest becomes radical.

In Road to Jehovah (1995), Ellison revisits the sacred third space, this time through a formal procession of figures ascending toward a spiritual destination. The composition is awash in rich blues and purples, with glowing yellows radiating from the church interior. The people, clad in a patchwork of florals, stripes, and earth tones, wear their Sunday best with sartorial pride. Yet, despite this individuality, a golden light from within the church blurs the distinctiveness of faces and garments. This visual gesture metaphorically enacts transcendence, suggesting that identity dissolves in the presence of collective faith.

Great Day in the Making (1995) continues this spiritual inquiry, composed in one-point perspective with layered oranges, purples, navies, and yellows. Figures gather or wait, their postures conveying quiet anticipation. The composition is fragmented by sharp lines that cut through the main imagery, breaking the scene into mosaic-like or stained glass-like sections. This segmentation heightens the tension and adds a fractured, almost sacred quality to the work. Cropped heads and limbs generate further disjunction, creating a cinematic, unresolved moment suspended in time. Ellison captures the liminality of early morning—a threshold between night and day, rest and labor, certainty and doubt—bridging the spiritual overtones of Road to Jehovah with the more psychological spaces explored later in the decade.

Closing out the decade, Waiting Room (1999) offers perhaps Ellison’s most powerful meditation on time, stillness, and human vulnerability. The claustrophobic scene, framed by endless hallways and repeating bricks and checkered floors, shows figures slumped in chairs, their outlines softened by shadow and repetition. Horizontal and vertical architectural lines emphasize entrapment and stasis. Anonymity transcends formal choice, becoming a universal reflection on waiting, patience, and isolation. The waiting room, typically a transitory zone, becomes an existential one, reflecting both physical entrapment and psychological fatigue. In this work, Ellison fully embraces stillness as a visual tool, grounding his exploration of communal life in moments of acute interiority.

Across Ellison’s prints of the ’80s and ’90s, we see a consistent visual philosophy: one that understands space as not merely a backdrop for action, but as a charged field of social meaning. Whether in the sanctity of a church, the blur of a shopping mall, the stillness of a waiting room, or the intimacy of a swimming pool, Ellison uses fragmentation, cropping, and color to illuminate how presence is shaped by space and vice versa.

By anonymizing his figures, Ellison resists easy narratives of identity, pushing viewers to look instead at gesture, rhythm, posture, and spatial relationships. Each composition becomes a study in presence, transition, and collective memory. In a society where Black life has often been surveilled, caricatured, or erased, Ellison offers another visual language: one of subtlety, dignity, and emotional truth.

Through formal clarity and thematic subtlety, Ellison reveals the hidden stories of third spaces—not through spectacle, but through fragments, rhythm, and quiet revelation.