COMING SOON
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
Ellis, D
LSD
On June 12, 1970, twenty‑five-year-old Dock Ellis pitched a complete‑game no‑hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates - while under the influence of LSD.
Two days prior, the team flew to San Diego for a series against the Padres. Ellis rented a car and drove home to Los Angeles to see his girlfriend, Mitzi, and his childhood friend Al Rambo. The next twelve hours dissolved into conversation, alcohol, marijuana, amphetamines, and eventually sleep. When Ellis woke sometime after noon, he took a dose of Purple Haze acid, believing it was his day off.
Ellis often used LSD during off days, retreating to a basement room he called “The Dungeon,” where he would listen to Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly. That afternoon, Mitzi glanced at the newspaper and realized Ellis was scheduled to pitch that evening.
“You slept through Thursday,” she told him. It was Friday
.
Ellis rushed to the airport and arrived in San Diego just in time for the game. He swallowed some amphetamines and took to the mound. His first pitch bounced two feet in front of the plate
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Later, Ellis recalled a sense of euphoria, the strike zone shifting shape, the baseball expanding and shrinking, the catcher appearing and vanishing. He hit batters, loaded the bases multiple times, and narrowly avoided balls he believed were line drives but weren’t hit hard and never even reached him. He chewed his gum into powder.
Somehow, through chaos and hallucinations, Dock recorded twenty‑seven outs without surrendering a hit. “I pitched a No No” he said.
LSD, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Got Me Floating
“You’ve Got Me Floating” is a song by Jimi Hendrix, an artist Dock Ellis frequently listened to while taking LSD in the basement room of his home that he called “the Dungeon.” Music, psychedelics, and isolation combined there in a private space for suspension, removed from both baseball and public scrutiny. Ellis described these experiences not as escape alone, but as moments when perception loosened and the world reordered itself.
Ellis appears distorted and airborne, his body lifted free from gravity and context. He floats superimposed over a recreation of a pastel drawing by Hendrix himself, collapsing artist and listener into a single psychic space. The sunlike halo behind Dock’s head evokes both sainthood and spectacle, recalling religious iconography while also pointing to the mythmaking that surrounded Black figures who refused limitation. The pose suggests transcendence
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The animals function as witnesses rather than aggressors, instinctive, untamed, and outside human systems of order. Their presence suggests the pull of the earthly and the feral, calling back to what floats above them. Beneath their feet, a mountain landscape grounds the scene in physical terrain, emphasizing the distance between the body and the land it has risen from.
The work frames Ellis not as escapist, but as temporarily untethered, held aloft by sound, chemistry, belief, and imagination, hovering between mythology and solitude.
Got Me Floating, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Koolaid and Kools, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Koolaid and Kools
Dock Ellis’s early memories are rooted in impulse, experimentation, and survival. As a boy, he pushed boundaries, throwing baseballs at door handles, roaming the neighborhood with friends, hunting rabbits and pigeons for food. With his friend Big Daddy, Ellis climbed water towers to capture pigeons, then retreated to a hidden spot they called their cave, where they mixed stolen Gallo wine with Kool‑Aid, shared watermelons, and drank themselves into oblivion. These moments reflect a childhood where play, hunger, risk, and rebellion blurred together.
Kool‑Aid and Kool cigarettes emerge in this painting as parallel symbols of Black American consumer culture, products marketed, adopted, and mythologized in distinct ways. Menthol cigarettes, particularly Kools, were aggressively advertised to Black urban communities, cultivating an image of coolness, ease, and sophistication. Their design, green lettering, brown filter, and restrained typography signaled style and identity. Over time, menthol smoking became disproportionately associated with African American consumers, a result of targeted marketing rather than preference alone.
Kool‑Aid occupies a familiar place in Black American domestic life, affordable, communal, and associated with childhood rituals and neighborhood gatherings. Additionally, it is associated with the psychedelic era of the 1960s, most famously through Ken Kesey’s “Electric Kool‑Aid Acid Tests,” where the drink became a vehicle for collective hallucination and imagined social transformation. In this context, Kool‑Aid symbolizes altered perception, communal experience, and the promise of escape.
Together, Kool‑Aid and Kools trace a continuum, from childhood sweetness and experimentation to adult self‑fashioning, revealing how consumption, identity, and illusion intersect in Ellis’s life and in American culture more broadly.
Hotdoggin', 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Hotdoggin'
In 1971, Dock Ellis reached the height of his career, starting the All‑Star Game and finishing the season with nineteen wins. That same All-Star game produced one of baseball’s most enduring images: Reggie Jackson’s mammoth home run off the roof at Tiger Stadium, a towering shot that struck a light pole above the third deck and entered baseball mythology as pure spectacle and power amplified for a national audience.
Hotdoggin’ frames that moment through the language of consumption. Hotdogs encircle the scene in a closed loop, dressed with mustard and buns, rendered as ritualized Americana rather than sustenance. Stadium food becomes symbolic of excess, celebration, and performance—what it means to “hotdog,” to showboat, to elevate bravado into entertainment. The pigeons perched above the ring echo Ellis’s childhood scavenging and survival, reminders that resourcefulness and hunger exist beneath the surface of spectacle.
Five years later, Ellis confronted Jackson again, pitching for the Yankees against Baltimore. Ellis hit Reggie who had been antagonizing him from the dugout, in the face. The retaliation was deliberate and costly, sidelining Jackson for weeks. Ellis later explained it simply: “I owed him one.”
Mustard, squeezed into Jackson’s looping signature becomes both autograph and provocation, a mark of authorship drawn from concession‑stand language. Behind it all, red‑and‑white bunting overlaps like a plastic tablecloth at a backyard barbecue, flattening patriotism into decoration.
Hotdoggin’ examines American sports as ritualized aggression and appetite—where rivalry, food, masculinity, and spectacle merge into something confrontational, and performative.
Bones, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Bones
Dock Ellis was among the few players in the late 1960s and 1970s who openly challenged Major League Baseball’s culture of silence around race and authority. He spoke publicly about racial abuse from fans and teammates, criticized the absence of Black managers and front‑office leadership, and confronted ownership with allegations of discrimination. His commitment to conscience over comfort made him influential, but also isolated. Ellis recalled receiving a letter from Jackie Robinson urging him to continue advocating for change, encouragement that arrived alongside threats and warnings from his own managers.
The Pittsburgh Pirates’ skull‑and‑crossbones logo appears here mounted on a player’s uniform, its skull crowned with an afro. Altered from within, the emblem becomes a figure of resistance rather than intimidation, a symbol of Black identity asserted inside an institution slow to change. Behind it, the stadium crowd dissolves into drifting fields of color, echoing Ellis’s distance from public opinion and the way mass judgment blurred into abstraction.
In the foreground, the cartoon tricksters Heckle and Jeckle appear as jailbirds, smoking a joint and laughing. Known for mocking authority and escaping punishment through wit rather than obedience, the characters reflect Ellis’s view of power as inconsistent, punitive, and performative. Ellis often watched cartoons alone in hotel rooms while on the road, finding momentary escape in worlds where rules bent and defiance reset without consequence. Their psychedelic smoke suggests altered perception, looping systems, and survival through irreverence.
Bones frames Ellis as captive and agitator at once, inside the system yet unwilling to submit, sustained by humor, clarity, and defiance.
In The Hooch, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
In The Hooch
In 1972, Dock Ellis traveled to Vietnam as a celebrity visitor, part of a program meant to boost morale among American troops. He arrived during an active and increasingly unpopular war, one that was deeply shaped by racial inequality. Ellis later recalled feeling most at ease with Black soldiers, gathering with them inside the hooches, temporary shelters where men drank, did drugs, talked, and listened to music to momentarily escape the conditions outside.
A soldier’s head is absorbed into camouflage. Facial features dissolve into green and brown, nearly disappearing into the pattern meant to conceal them. The image suggests how individuality is erased by war, and how Black identity in particular was swallowed by a system that sent disproportionate numbers of Black men to fight while offering little protection or recognition upon return.
Ellis spoke openly about the contradictions of the visit: celebratory excess existing alongside violence, pleasure beside fear. Alcohol and drugs circulated freely, blurring the boundaries between sanctioned service and illicit survival. Though he was not meant to participate in combat, Ellis recalled moments when proximity collapsed the
distance between observer and participant.
In the Hooch reflects this moral compression. The camouflage does not conceal; it absorbs. The figure is neither hero nor civilian, but something unsettled in between. The work frames the Vietnam War not as spectacle, but as saturation—where escape, danger, duty, and disorientation coexist in the same space.
The Maced Ace, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
The Maced Ace
On May 5, 1972, Dock Ellis was denied entry through the players’ gate at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. An argument with a security guard escalated, and Ellis was maced. At the time, he had just had his hair blown out, leaving his scalp irritated and exposed. Ellis later recalled his head burning for days. The guard claimed Ellis failed to properly identify himself, made threatening gestures, and carried a half‑empty bottle of wine. Ellis denied these accusations, insisting he had identified himself by showing his 1971 World Series ring. He would later attribute the guard’s unrelated death in a motorcycle accident to “bad karma.”
The incident was not an anomaly but part of a broader pattern of confrontation in Ellis’s career—particularly with the Cincinnati Reds. On May 1, 1974, convinced his teammates had grown passive and intimidated, Ellis announced before the game that he intended to assert dominance. He opened the contest by hitting three consecutive Cincinnati batters; Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Dan Driessen, loading the bases without recording an out. After narrowly missing Tony Perez, Ellis threw two pitches near Johnny Bench’s head and was immediately removed from the game.
Ellis didn’t consider these actions reckless. For him, pitching was psychological warfare. He believed intimidation was fundamental to the role, a strategic assertion of control in a game that rewarded submission. “You hit me, I hit you,” he said. Pitching, for Ellis, was not just mechanics or strength, but performance: an exercise in fear, ego, and momentary power. A pitcher, he believed, ruled the field -if only for a night.
Bubbles, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Bubbles
Chewing gum has long been part of baseball’s visual language, puffed cheeks, slow jaw movement, idle ritual between pitches, combating boredom in the dugout. In the 1970s it became spectacle through bubble‑blowing contests, exaggerated gestures, and an embrace of playfulness within an increasingly televised sport. The bubbles in this painting reference that tradition, but also suggest restraint, breath held and released, pressure contained within thin skins before collapsing.
Dock Ellis approached his own appearance by stretching the limits of fashion as expression. Over time, he constantly revised his look: straightening his hair, wearing cornrows and plaits, growing an afro, shaving it down, or clipping it tight. Clothing followed the same impulse, light green trousers, flowered shirts, jewelry, and oversized red, heart‑shaped sunglasses. Style, for Ellis, was neither static nor incidental; it was a declaration of autonomy.
In August 1973, after Ebony magazine featured his many hairstyles, Ellis began arriving at the ballpark wearing hair curlers. He sometimes left them in during pre‑game warm‑ups, visible to early‑arriving fans. Team management ordered him to remove the curlers before taking the field. Ellis publicly challenged the directive, arguing that it was discriminatory. He noted that white players were permitted to wear long hairpieces without reprimand.
Bubbles captures this moment: style as resistance, ornament as provocation, and self‑expression pushing against tightly enforced boundaries—like air expanding until release becomes inevitable.
MLB (Major League Babes), 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
MLB (Major League Babes)
Dock Ellis’s rookie season in 1968 marked a sudden transformation. Drafted into Major League Baseball, his life became a blur of charter flights, stewardesses, hotel rooms, and unfamiliar cities unfolding night after night. The rhythm of the season was matched by a parallel social world that surrounded professional athletes defined by attention, access, and indulgence.
Ellis embraced the visibility. He dressed extravagantly, favoring glittering jumpsuits, dramatic maxicoats, and bold color. Appearance became performance and attitude, a way of signaling arrival in the Big Leagues as much as strikeouts or wins. What he wore mattered, both on and off the field.
Hotels became stages. Fans lingered in lobbies. Encounters were frequent and fleeting, and Ellis spoke openly about the way women seemed to orbit the game itself. He half‑jokingly believed opposing teams, particularly the Montreal Expos, sent women to distract and exhaust visiting players. Montreal, he later joked, was populated by “God’s gift to earth.”
MLB (Major League Babes) examines an atmosphere of pursuit and distraction, how fame, desire, and performance intersected in Ellis’s career. It points to a broader mythology of professional sports where celebrity blurred boundaries and excess was treated as an unofficial rite of passage. It reveals a culture where indulgence was normalized and visibility carried both pleasure and consequence.
Sideshow, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Sideshow
In the visual culture of 1970s baseball, adornment carried meaning. Mustaches flourished across the league worn by players as symbols of individuality, bravado, and generational shift. They added attitude as an accessory.
The sports mascot emerged in a similar role. The San Diego Chicken began as a sideshow intended as light entertainment at the margins of the event. He started as a ragged rental costume with a papier‑mâché head atop a bulky body stitched from orange zigzag fabric meant to suggest feathers. The effect was less mascot than menace, known more for frightening children than delighting crowds.
But what began as a joke quickly became something unprecedented. The Chicken’s exaggerated performative physicality, defiant humor, and willingness to mock the seriousness of “America’s Pastime” transformed the role entirely. No longer just a novelty, he became a performer, a disruptor, and eventually a cultural fixture reshaping the atmosphere at the ballpark.
Widely recognized as the first modern professional sports mascot and an inaugural inductee into the Mascot Hall of Fame, the San Diego Chicken represents a broader shift in American sports culture during the 1970s. Like the mustache, the mascot moved from accessory to symbol, evidence of an era when appearance, performance, and identity became inseparable from the game itself.
Dockula, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Dockula
From the beginning of his career, Dock Ellis refused to accommodate the racism embedded in American baseball and society. As a nineteen‑year‑old minor leaguer in 1964, he confronted white teammates and fans directly, engaging in multiple fights over racial abuse. On more than one occasion, Ellis responded physically to hecklers, entering the stands or gesturing openly from the field. These acts earned him condemnation from the press, which cast him as unstable and hostile rather than as a player demanding dignity.
Even at the height of his success, Ellis remained a target. In 1971, his best season, with nineteen wins and an All‑Star start, local newspapers still labeled him the most unpopular Pirate. Hate mail arrived in stacks. Threatening phone calls were common. His car was stolen and burned. Yet Ellis rejected the idea that silence and acceptance were mandatory. He believed that the same freedom fans claimed to insult him was the freedom he claimed to speak back.
Dockula draws on the blaxploitation film figure Blacula, introduced in the early 1970s as an African prince transformed into a monster and imprisoned for resisting colonial power. Like Mamuwalde, Ellis was cast as dangerous for refusing submission. Both figures are vilified, surveilled, and attacked for challenging authority.
Rendered here as a Black vampire, Dock Ellis becomes mythic: ageless, furious, and resilient. The image reframes rage not as pathology, but as survival, an expression of life lived under constant threat, and refusal to disappear quietly.
Three Rivers, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
Three Rivers
On September 1, 1971, at Three Rivers Stadium, with Dock Ellis on the mound, the Pittsburgh Pirates became the first Major League team to start nine Black players in a game. The moment was unprecedented, a quiet but radical reordering of baseball’s racial codes. After decades of segregation and token inclusion, the lineup represented a shifting landscape in MLB. It was a big breakthrough within a league that remained overwhelmingly white in coaching, management and ownership.
Three Rivers Stadium opened just a year earlier at Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle,” where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio. Designed as a multipurpose arena for both baseball and football, its nearly circular form attempted to serve conflicting needs. The result was a structure criticized for satisfying neither, a concrete compromise emblematic of an era that valued efficiency over integrity.
The stadium floats in a river of amber resin, evoking whiskey, beer, and the constant presence of alcohol in clubhouse culture. The liquid reads as celebration and ritual, but also as dependency and erosion. For Dock Ellis, whose career paralleled escalating substance use, alcohol functioned as currency, anesthesia, and escape. Three Rivers becomes both site and symbol: where racial progress, labor, celebration, excess, and escape briefly converge before drifting downstream.
The Bomb
A customized Chevy Impala, ordered by a local pimp and abandoned when he couldn’t pay for it, became Dock Ellis’s car by chance. The vehicle’s exaggerated styling, polished surfaces, and assertion of status reflected a culture in which visibility was a form of power. For Ellis, the car became less an object of luxury than a symbol of motion: a way out.
As a child in Los Angeles, Ellis played a game he called “get away.” With his friend Big Daddy, he would turn on fire hydrants and wait until police and firefighters were close before running. The game rehearsed pursuit and escape, pleasure bound tightly to danger. That tension shaped his adolescence in a city already straining under racial and economic pressure.
In August 1965, the Watts neighborhood erupted after the arrest of a Black motorist and his family. The rebellion lasted six days, drawing national attention to conditions of unemployment, segregation, and state violence. Armed patrols, burning buildings, and curfews defined the landscape. Jimi Hendrix’s “House Burning Down” later captured the chaos and futility of that moment.
Ellis grew up with incarceration as an all too often ordinary outcome. During baseball off‑seasons, he worked with prisoners, aware of the path narrowly avoided. Baseball offered structure, travel, and exemption, but never neutrality. The Impala embodies that fragile distance: speed as escape, style as assertion, and movement as survival.
The Bomb, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
White Rabbit, 2008, tinted resin on mdf, 46 x 33 x 1.25 inches
White Rabbit
By the late 1970s, Dock Ellis’s career was unraveling. Between 1977 and 1979 he drifted from team to team as his arm weakened and the structure that had once elevated him collapsed. The promise of the game faded, replaced by anger, boredom, and compulsive escape. Substance abuse in the form of, alcohol, cocaine, and speed, became dominant forces not of rebellion, but of erosion. Baseball no longer functioned as a discipline or shield; it receded into background noise.
The white rabbit draws multiple lines of meaning together. Based on a Cracker Jack prize plastic figurine, it references baseball’s most famous seventh inning stretch song “Take me out to the Ballgame.” Simultaneously, the figure alludes to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which the White Rabbit leads Alice out of the known world and into disorientation. In contemporary drug culture, “going down the rabbit hole” has become shorthand for immersion into altered states.
Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song “White Rabbit” explicitly linked the imagery of Alice to the hallucinatory effects of psychedelics, collapsing innocence and excess into a single cultural reference point. The monochrome white resin amplifies this saturation, suggesting both purity and erasure.
Scattered dandelion seeds, symbols of wishes, rendered as mirrored circles, evoke dispersion, fragility, and reflection, while also pointing to cocaine’s popular surface to cut lines. Together, the elements frame the rabbit not as a guide forward, but as a lure downward.
Ellis eventually entered recovery and later worked as a substance‑abuse counselor. White Rabbit marks the moment before that turn: surrender disguised as wonder, descent mistaken for freedom.