David Winton Bell Gallery

About the Gallery



David Winton Bell Gallery

The David Winton Bell Gallery is Brown's contemporary art gallery and home to an important part of the University's permanent art collection. Founded in 1971, the Gallery hosts four to five major exhibitions per year, each with associated programming including lectures, performances, and symposia. Broadly concerned with the exhibition of exemplary work by artists living today, the Gallery takes pride in showing artwork of diverse media and content and makes special efforts to support and show the work of emerging or under-recognized practitioners locally, nationally and internationally. Alongside the contemporary arts, the Gallery also makes use of its art historical collections, programming exhibitions on the arts and culture of the last five centuries. Recent exhibitions include solo shows by Melvin Edwards, Carrie Mae Weems, Pierre Huyghe, and Diana Al-Hadid, as well as thematic group exhibitions such as Fertile Ground: María Berrío, Zoë Charlton, Joiri Minaya and Dead Animals, or the curious occurrence of taxidermy in contemporary art

The Bell Gallery maintains a permanent collection of more than 7,000 works of art, dating from the 16th century to the present, with particularly rich holdings in 20th and 21st century works on paper. Drawings by Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler complement contemporary works by Rina Banerjee, Sean Scully, Michelle Grabner, Denise Green, and Chitra Ganesh.  Seminal works, such as Lee Bontecou’s Untitled,1962 sculptural relief and Blue Horizon, Frank Stella’s important transitional painting from 1952 are highlights of the painting and sculpture collections. The encyclopedic print collection runs the gamut of western art from Durer and Aldegrever to Callot and Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya, Daumier and Manet, Kollwitz and Kirchner, and to Warhol, Schnabel, Mark Dion and Ghada Amer. Particularly strong in mid-century documentation, the photography collection features significant work by Walker Evans, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Larry Clark, and Danny Lyon, as well as recent additions by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mickelene Thomas, Wafaa Bilal, and Graciela Iturbide. 

Named in memory of David Winton Bell ‘54, the gallery is housed in the Albert and Vera List Art Building, a multi-functional building that also includes classrooms, lecture halls, and extensive studio space. Designed by internationally renowned architect Philip Johnson, List Art is located on the crest of College Hill, in close proximity to the RISD Museum and downtown Providence. The triangular jags of the roof line—with skylights installed to light art studios—are a staple of Providence's skyline.