"Ellery Neon enters this coffee shop in his signature color palette. He's wearing a pastel lemon yellow sweater personalized with large silver rings, dark jeans slicked with patches of paint, lime green sunglasses. It's a palette you may have seen in his graffiti or murals in countless cities around the world. At the Brooklyn Museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art."
"In Miss Major Griffin-Gracy's Arkansas home. On community fridges and health care centers, lining the edges of apartment buildings, in the drag wrestling troupe Choke Hole he co-founded. You may have seen it accompanied by an ebb and flow of letters spelling out the words "Hugo Gyrl," the tag he's been using for a decade. "Why am I making all this fucking gay ass bullshit?" he laughs."
"A native of downtown Brooklyn, his parents were also artists - his father is the Lithuanian poet Vyt Bakaitis, who was born during WWII and left after the Soviet Union re-invaded in the 1940s, at one point living in refugee camps. His mother was the artist Sharon Gilbert, grandchild of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. A self-described angsty teen, he attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts for visual art."
Ellery Neon, known by the tag Hugo Gyrl, creates vivid queer-inflected public art that appears in museums, community fridges, health centers, apartment exteriors, and city murals worldwide. He pairs a pastel neon palette with graffiti lettering, performance, and collaborative projects like the drag wrestling troupe Choke Hole. He grew up in downtown Brooklyn with artist parents of Eastern European background, left home as a teen amid post-9/11 xenophobia, and channels subculture and worldbuilding into work that centers marginalized communities, reclaims institutional spaces, and fuses activism with theatrical visual language.
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