David Winton Bell Gallery

Past Exhibitions

September 18, 2023 - December 3, 2023

Inaugurating Brown Arts' IGNITE Series, Varying Shades of Brown is a campus-wide project featuring major installations and programs by artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, OR), whose conceptual, image-focused work has been revered for over four decades. Through a variety of mediums and activations, Weems renders historical moments uncanny to draw out the complexities of racial and gendered violence. Integrating artistic practice and arts research, Weems—in her role as the first Agnes Gund Professor of the Practice of Art and Social Justice at Brown Arts Institute (BAI)—collaborated closely with students in her course "Artist@Work: Carrie Mae Weems" to develop Varying Shades of Brown. Sites include the David Winton Bell Gallery and List Lobby Gallery in the List Art Center; Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts; the Main Hall and Attanasio Family Promenade of the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center; and various public spaces across campus.

Location Bell Gallery, List Lobby, Cohen Gallery
February 9, 2023 - June 4, 2023

Filmmaker and artist Elisabeth Subrin's The Listening Takes (2023) presents three portraits of the subversive French actress Maria Schneider (1952–2011) within an immersive sound, video, and sculptural installation. Collaborating with the women who portray Maria (internationally acclaimed actress Manal Issa, and Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval, who are celebrated directors and actresses), The Listening Takes focuses on Schneider's refusal within a 1983 interview to discuss her controversial lead role opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the non-consensual sex scene that she was subjected to on the set. As she articulates her perspective as a woman within the film industry, Schneider reveals a devastating prescience about the ways women are defined within and beyond cinema. Filmed for both black box theater and multi-channel gallery presentations, Subrin's project untethers Schneider from Tango and allows the nuances of Maria's interview to be reimagined within three extraordinary performances, each generously listening, and holding space, for one another. 

Location Bell Gallery
January 25, 2023 - June 4, 2023

Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #436: Asymmetrical pyramid with color ink washes superimposed, currently installed on loan from the LeWitt Foundation at Brown University’s Health and Wellness Center as part of the Public Art program, features five asymmetrical triangles resembling the unfolded faces of a pentagonal pyramid. LeWitt employed a minimalist style in his drawings, convinced that the value of art lies in the quality of the idea rather than its physical form. Using a combination of colors, geometrical shapes, and textures, his work derives inspiration from various movements of mid-twentieth century American art that similarly depicted simplified and abstract figures.

Featuring a combination of prints, collage, and painting by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Charmion Von Wiegand drawn from the Bell Gallery Collection, the objects on display echo an amalgam of the styles and visual forms entwined in the work of LeWitt and his peers. 

Location List Lobby
September 16, 2022 - December 18, 2022

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. This exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact everyday life for many millions of people. Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach and devastation of the US carceral state.

Location Bell Gallery, List Lobby, Cohen Gallery
February 21, 2022 - May 29, 2022

Lisa Reihana’s immersive installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015-17) transforms the Bell into a lush land and soundscape, one that reimagines 18th century European exploration of the Pacific as a cycle of colonial reinfection and Indigenous recuperation rather than singular moments of contact. Emerging from her encounter with the 19th century French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean), 1804-5 by Joseph Dufour et Cie, Reihana has transformed these utopian depictions of Captain James Cook’s voyages into surreal vignettes of curiosity, caution, desire, and predation. By unfixing the Indigenous peoples of the original wallpaper from Eurocentric neoclassical fantasy, Reihana–who is Māori–allows for Indigenous agency both within the film and through her practice of “agreed representation” with actors and performers. 

Visibility and its refusal are central to this project. The scrolling panorama of an imagined Tahitian landscape acts as an arena where gazes cross, meet, are evaded and recorded. in Pursuit of Venus [infected] challenges historic visual records, their narratives embellished and redacted, enshrined in the decorative wallpaper and scientific journals of the Enlightenment. Projected across the Bell’s seventy-foot wall, this thirty minute film is on continual loop; beginning, middle, and end elusive within a wash of color and sound. 

February 21, 2022 - May 29, 2022

Reflecting the myriad questions Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected] installation raises in the adjacent Bell gallery, this small presentation of collection work examines the ways in which American artists have depicted rural landscapes through the framing device of the highway. From the ribbon of pavement that undulates into the distance in Danny Lyons’s The Road to Yazoo City (1963) to Allan D'Arcangelo’s colorful Pop Art amalgams, these artists lean into, and often critique, the mythology that has accrued around “the open road.” 

Removed from the context of their portfolios and projects–John Pfahl’s manufactured landscapes, Lucas Foglia’s study of homesteaders in the Southwest–individual and paired works create new meaning through this grouping. Space, time, access, ownership, and “Manifest Destiny” all churn in relation to Reihana’s focus on the colonial gaze. The car as a site of surveillance is amplified in two works by Garry Winogrand, both of which appear to have been shot from the driver’s seat. With the Bell’s collection strength in photography, this show gathers some of the medium’s most celebrated names, offering nuances in approach and execution. Featuring works by Allan D'Arcangelo, Lucas Foglia, Danny Lyon, John Pfahl, and Garry Winogrand.

Location LIST LOBBY
September 9, 2021 - November 28, 2021

Friends, collaborators, and intergenerational activists whose practices both enrich and reflect one another in this exhibition, 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. 

Location BELL GALLERY
September 9, 2021 - November 28, 2021

Barbara Bosworth consistently documents the variety of ways humans move through and around the natural world. Using a large-format 8x10 camera, she captures moments that range from fleeting to enduring, encounters with people banding migratory birds to scenic views from the New England Trail. On view in the List Lobby are four works from her “Champion Trees” series, black-and-white prints in triptych and diptych form that mark the largest examples of native tree specimens in the United States according to the National Register of Champion Trees (a list created and updated by the conservation organization American Forests, founded in 1875). This grouping of four works from the series—American Elm, Kansas, 1990 (1990); Longbeak Eucalyptus, Arizona, 2001 (2001); Singleleaf Ash, Colorado, 2001 (2001); and Sugarberry, South Carolina, 1994 (1994)—is presented adjacent to the Bell exhibition Arrows of Desire: Harry Gould Harvey IV and Faith Wilding, artists whose practices are similarly devoted to the natural world with a love of native trees and plants. 

Location LIST LOBBY
April 21, 2021 - July 18, 2021

Savannah Knoop’s practice consistently centers itself within questions of intimacy. Whether through performance—where they draw on both art historical models and their decades-long training in jiu jitsu—or the sculptural work on view in this exhibition, Knoop deploys improvisation and proximity as strategies in the making and activation of their work.

Curator: Kate Kraczon

Image: Savannah Knoop, Free Weaving the News (November 2019), 2020

Location BELL GALLERY
April 21, 2021 - July 18, 2021

Dating from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present day, Spectrums: Gender in the Bell Collection contains myriad interpretations of gender that are not “concretised” or reified, but rather embodied and performed in unexpected ways. Veering into the ghostly, the uncanny, and the defiant, the images in this exhibition reveal variance and creativity in the presentation of gender throughout the decades. Featuring works by Berenice Abbott, Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Callahan, Martine Gutierrez, Graciela Iturbide, Deana Lawson, Danny Lyon, Helmut Newton, Andy Warhol, and John Willis.

Curator: Deborah Krieger, Curatorial Fellow

Image: Martine Gutierrez, Demons, Chin 'Demon of Lust,' p93 from Indigenous Woman, 2018

Location LIST LOBBY
September 11, 2020 - December 18, 2020

Raymond Hood and the American Skyscraper brings together examples of Hood’s most compelling, uniquely American experimentations with the skyscraper form. The exhibition employs Hood’s skyscrapers as a lens through which to examine architectural education and genesis as well as architectural technology and illumination. It will include approximately 75 architectural drawings, photographs, models, videos, and books that explore a selection of Hood’s built and unbuilt skyscrapers including: Tribune Tower, Chicago, 1922; American Radiator Building, New York, 1924; Tower City, unbuilt, 1927; Daily News Building, New York, 1930; McGraw-Hill Building, New York, 1931; and Rockefeller Center, New York, 1930–39.

Curated by: Dietrich Neumann and Jonathan Duval
Image: Donald Douglas, McGraw-Hill Building under construction, ca. 1930. Raymond Mathewson Hood papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

 

November 16, 2019 - March 15, 2020

Wendy Edwards’ paintings combine luscious colors and exuberant gestures in compositions that respond to the artist’s life and vary from landscapes and still lifes to pure abstraction. This forty-year retrospective includes works created since 1980, when Edwards joined Brown’s faculty. 

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Wendy Edwards, Pink Thrill, 1998

Location Bell Gallery