David Winton Bell Gallery

Past Events



Friday, September 24, 2021
6:00pm

Join us Friday, September 24th at 6pm for a conversation between current Bell artists Harry Gould Harvey IV and Faith Wilding and William Blake scholar and RISD Professor Alexander Gourlay. The event will be held inside our List Auditorium. The Bell and List Lobby galleries will have extended viewing hours that day through 8pm. Masks are required both indoors and outdoors at all times.

Friends, collaborators, and intergenerational activists whose practices both enrich and reflect one another in their Bell exhibition Arrows of Desire, Harry Gould Harvey IV and Faith Wilding have emerged from the pandemic in a state of mutual reverence. Hinged by their shared devotion to William Blake (1757-1827), a gravitational force that has been overt throughout both careers, Wilding and Harvey embrace the apocalyptic language and imagery of the Romantic writer and artist, whose illustrated poem Milton (1804-1811) titles the show. Installed in the Bell are solo and collaborative works, including a series of ten archival images of Wilding’s radical feminist performances from the 1970s and 1980s, enlarged and enframed by Harvey in intricately carved wood. 

Alexander Gourlay has been studying, writing, and teaching about British literature and art, especially William Blake, for more than 40 years. He hopes to be able to understand Blake's Jerusalem someday. He is particularly interested in the intersection of visual and verbal in literary illustration. When he was hired in 1991 by the Rhode Island School of Design, he felt like a frog that had been kissed—still a frog, but happier.  

Harry Gould Harvey IV is an artist and curator whose practices are embedded in community and social justice. His work is featured in Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial, New York, and he has had numerous exhibitions at Bureau, New York and at national and international spaces including Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2018) and GRIN, Providence (2016). In 2020 Harvey and his wife, artist Brittni Ann Harvey, founded the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FR MOCA) on the first floor of the historic Granite Mills textile mill. Previously, his roving curatorial platform Pretty Days, co-founded with Gregory Kalliche, produced projects in Providence and Miami, FL.

Faith Wilding is a renowned feminist artist, writer, and educator who is currently a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. For over four decades her work has remained at the intersections of feminism, social justice, cyberfeminism, biotechnology, radical pedagogy, and eco-feminism. Wilding co-initiated the Feminist Art Programs at California State University, Fresno, and CalArts, Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and was a founding member of the feminist art movement in Southern California. Her work was the subject of the retrospective Faith Wilding’s Fearful Symmetries organized by Threewalls, Chicago in 2014 which traveled to multiple venues. 

Moderated by Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator, Brown Arts Institute / David Winton Bell Gallery.

Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings (see the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals).

Location BELL GALLERY
Sunday, July 18, 2021
6:00pm

On Sunday, July 18th artist Savannah Knoop will be joined by ritualist Elana June Margolis to mark the physical and spiritual closing of Knoop’s exhibition Soothing the Seams at the Bell. Margolis will situate this ritual within the heart-map provided by the Jewish calendar: July 18th, 2021 is also the 9th of the month of Av in the year 5781 AKA Tisha b'Av, a day set aside to honor the collective broken heart through grief ritual. Participants are encouraged to bring a candle, some fabric to rip/tear, a bowl of water, paper, and something to write with.

While acknowledging that the pandemic is ongoing, this collective ritual marks the official end date of the exhibition and allows for closure to Knoop’s process and by extension acknowledges the trauma, challenges, and other closures that the pandemic has brought into all of our lives. Participants will be invited both to witness and to step into active, intimate engagement with multiple grief technologies, creating space for personal healing towards collective liberation.

Elana June Margolis is a Queer Jewish teacher, writer, ritualist and performing artist. Her life's work is dedicated to liberating texts and ritual/pedagogical technologies towards access, relevance, and healing in service of collective liberation. Elana June has been making and playing with Knoop for fifteen years; she is honored and excited to continue the antics and plunge the depths with her beloved co-conspirator.

Savannah Knoop is an artist and educator working in film, sculpture, writing, and performance. They have exhibited and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Movement Research, and Leslie Lohman Museum, New York. Their solo exhibition Savannah Knoop: Soothing the Seams closes at the Bell Gallery at Brown University on July 18th.

Register HERE to attend this virtual event live.

Location Online
Friday, April 10, 2020
5:30pm

RAYMOND HOOD AND THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER

Katherine Solomonson, Professor University of Minnesota
Who was the winner? Hood, Howells and the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition

Isabelle Gournay, Associate Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
An American in Paris: Raymond Hood and the Ecole des Beaux Arts
 

Location List Art Auditorium and Bell Gallery
Friday, November 15, 2019
5:30pm

Wendy Edwards in Conversation with Ruth Fine

Reception to follow

Location List Art Auditorium
Friday, September 13, 2019
5:30pm

CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS
moderated by guest curator Heather Bhandari

Reception to follow

Location List Art Auditorium
Friday, June 7, 2019
5:30pm
Location Bell Gallery Lobby
Thursday, April 18, 2019
5:30pm


 

A lecture by Chris Elphick
Principal Investigator, SHARP (Saltmarsh Habitation and Avian and Research Program)
Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut 

With rising sea levels, tidal marshes and species such as the saltmarsh sparrow that depend on them, face many threats.  This talk will describe the status of tidal marsh birds in the northeast, the ways that marshes are changing, and the role that humans play in protecting coastal ecosystems.

Location List Art Auditorium
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
5:30pm

 

Photographer and Brown alum Bill Jacobson is best recognized for his ghostly, out of focus images of people. Begun during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the images evoke both loss and the futility of capturing true human likenesses in portraiture and memory.  In recent years, Jacobson has investigated geometry and space —particularly rectangles, which he notes do not exist in nature—in natural and man-made settings.

Location List Art Auditorium
Friday, November 2, 2018
5:30pm

Jennifer Betts, University Archivist and Assistant Director for the John Hay Library
Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Reception to follow

Location Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center
Friday, September 14, 2018
5:30pm

Reception to follow


Location List Art Auditorium