David Winton Bell Gallery

Past Exhibitions

Student Exhibition 2010
February 20, 2010 - March 13, 2010

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the 30th annual Student Exhibition, juried by Randi Hopkins, associate curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Artists included in this year's exhibition are Genevieve Busby, Kevin Cervantes, Jesse Cohn, Alice Costas, Jessica Daniels, Sara D'Apolito-Dworkin, Leilani Diaz, Shane Farrell, Quinn Fenlon, Noel Madison Fetting-Smith, Susannah Ford, John Haenle, Ana Fox-Hodess, Sarah Grimm, Aviva Grossman, Brook Hair, Melissa Henry, Daisy Johnson, You Bin Kang, Adria Katz, Emma LeBlanc, Nancy Chenxi Li, Alejandra Lindstrom, Mary MacGill, Lydia Magyar, Lissa Mazanec, Crow Jonah Norlander, Anne Oram, Kate Owen, Pook Panyarachun, Michael Price, Erina Shibata, Jill Silverberg, Alex Toyoshima, Randall Trang, Jessie Wang, Kelly Winter, Christopher Yamane, and Aaron Zick.

image: Michael Price, Merse, 2010

Location Gallery and Lobby
M. F. Husain
February 5, 2010 - March 26, 2010

M. F. Husain is mounted in conjunction with the Year of India at Brown University. One of the most recognized figures in Indian art, Husain's career spans the rise of modernism in India and the introduction of contemporary Indian art onto the international art stage. Focusing on Husain's early works, the collection provides a view into the artist's first manifestations of favorite subjects: life on the streets, women and horses (together and apart), and mythological and religious personages.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin and Mallica Kumbera Landrus
image: Amusement in the Street, 1957

Location Gallery
November 14, 2009 - February 14, 2010

Created for the current exhibition, Rachel Berwick's new installation entitled Zugunruhe is her second memorial to the passenger pigeon. Once numbering in the billions, the species inspired awe in nineteenth-century naturalists and experienced a rapid decline that brought it to the edge of extinction by 1900. The last passenger pigeon, Martha died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on September 1, 1914.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: detail of Zugunruhe

Location Gallery
Kristen Hassenfeld
August 29, 2009 - November 1, 2009

Kirsten Hassenfeld's elaborate paper sculptures draw on the artist's love of ornamentation and find power through her painstaking craftsmanship. The product of hundreds of hours of cutting, folding, rolling and coiling, her works have taken the form of jewels and luxury goods, ornaments and vases, and most recently trees and flowers. The Bell Gallery exhibition includes two bodies of work: Blueware, new works that combine decorative ceramics and nature, and Dans la Lune, a fanciful installation of ornate hanging sculpture that was commissioned in 2007 by the Rice Art Gallery, Houston, TX.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Blueware, 2009

Location Gallery
A gathering of trees
August 29, 2009 - December 21, 2009

A stylistically eclectic selection of works from the permanent collection, ranging from Rembrandt to Kirchner, Morisot, Callahan, Terry Winters, and Barbara Bosworth.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Camille Corot, Environs Near Rome, 1866

Location Lobby
April 11, 2009 - May 29, 2009

Inappropriate Covers includes multi-media works by eleven established and emerging artists, chosen for the aesthetic tensions they generate through acts of appropriation, reconfiguration, and erasure. Works in the exhibition range from the refined to the outrageous. Jim Campbell's elegant sculptures muse on memory and loss: the artist's own heatbeat and breath set the frequency of layers of fog that appears on a glass, covering and uncovering photographs of his parents. At the other end of the specturm is Kelly Heaton's Live Pelt. Heaton refers to the cloak, which is made from sixty-four used Tickle Me Elmo dolls purchased on E-bay, as her "substitute lover." In addition to Campbell and Heaton, artists participating in the exhibition are Brian Dettmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Marclay, L. Amelia Raley, Ted Riederer, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Syjuco, John Oswald, and Mark Wallinger.

Curated by Braxton Soderman and Justin Katko
image: Kelly Heaton, Live Pelt–Portrait of the Fashionista, 2003

Location Gallery
Scavengers
April 11, 2009 - August 1, 2009

Scavengers explores the unique approaches of seven artists to the essentially material and tactile nature of sculpture. In order to highlight the materiality of their medium, and to reframe conventional understandings of it, each of these sculptors has brought the raw substance of their work, quite literally, to the surface. By drawing on found objects and scavenged, everyday materials, they have attempted to focus the viewer's experience on the substantive composition of their work as much as, and sometimes more than, its form. In their incorporation of both non-traditional sculptural elements and commonplace industrial elements, these works go beyond mere techniques of abstraction and challenge the autonomy of form as the conveyor of meaning. Scavengers is the drawn from the permanent collection and includes work by Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, Georg Herold, Dieter Roth, Creighton Michael, Italo Scanga, and Hannah Wilke.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: installation view with George Herold, Promise, in foreground, and works by Hannah Wilke, Italo Scanga, and Lee Bontecou

Student Exhibition 2009
March 14, 2009 - March 29, 2009

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the 29th annual Student Exhibition, juried by Berin Golonu, an independent curator from New York, and Providence artist Amy Lovera. Artists included in this year’s exhibition are Sarah Abarbanel, Olutade Abidoye, Megan Billman, Anne Blazejack, Galen Broderick, Brittaney Check & Andrew Seiden, Jessica Chermayeff, Jesse Cohn, Alexandra Corrigan, Sara D’Apolito-Dworkin, Danielle DesBordes, Bart Dessaint, Bret Ecker, Quinn Fenlon, Emily Garfield, Shane Farrell, Hilary Fischer-Groban, Drew Foster, Pik-Shuen Fung, Brooke Hair, David Hernandez, Gillian Lang, Jungmin Lee, Geddes Levenson, Emily Martin, Alexa Morita, Anne Oram, Erica Palmiter, Phillippa Pitts, Talia Rozensher, Claire Russo, Peter N. Scheidt, Hannah Singer, Tyrell Skeet, Zachary A. Smith, Lydia Stein, John Szymanski, Christina Wang, Aaron Weinstein, and Sabine Zimmer. 

image: Aaron Weinstein, Abstraction of Beetle Horn 1, 2009

Location Gallery
KNOT: An installation by Annabel Daou
January 23, 2009 - March 8, 2009

The Bell Gallery presents a solo-exhibition of Annabel Daou, a Lebanese-born and New York-based artist. Entitled KNOT, the three-part exhibition consists of twelve notebooks with a continuously drawn line that are laid out on a table much like a map; a site-specific wall drawing that transcribes the lines of the notebooks into the gallery space; and a twelve-fold accordian brochure that charts the notebook drawings into a single line. The title KNOT alludes to an inherent reversibility between the text and image, reading and seeing, reflection and experience, creation and interpretation.The project is a collaboration between the artist and the writer David Markus, in which twelve words chosen by Markus — aporia sacrifice muse island place game object trauma donimation distance that — serve as guidelines for Daou's visual exploration of linguistic meaning.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: detail of wall drawing

Location Gallery
Warhol's People
January 23, 2009 - March 8, 2009

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Dorothy Hamill

Location Lobby
The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye: Elizabeth King
November 8, 2008 - December 21, 2008

The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye is a mid-career survey of the work of sculptor Elizabeth King. King makes meticulously crafted objects that raise questions about life and artifice, and the nature of being. Her uncanny self-portraits, articulated arms, artificial eyes, and tissue samples are created in a range of natural materials: from porcelain, wood, bronze, and basalt to kidskin, and human hair and eye lashes. The exhibition includes 65 sculptures, film animations, installation pieces, drawings, and photographs produced since the late 1970s. Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye was organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia.

image: Pupil, 1987-90

Location Gallery
September 6, 2008 - October 19, 2008

Seventeen years after the end of the Soviet Union, Views and Re-Views invites a post-Cold War assessment of Soviet graphic arts. The exhibition suggests that artistic merit may be found in art in the service of political belief and subject to state regulation and that there is a range of stylistic diversity within work that is too often simply (and dismissively) characterized as Socialist Realism. Viewers may also note that with the passage of time it has become possible to see that not all criticisms of the West by Soviet artists are completely spurious or inauthentic. Views and Re-Views includes posters, cartoons, photomontages, and postcards spanning more than six decades, from the time of the Russian Civil War (1918–21) into the late Soviet period. The exhibition includes well-known Soviet graphic works, by such artists as Viktor Deni, Dmitri Moor, El Lissitsky, and Gustav Klutsis, as well as lesser-known, but equally compelling works by the Kukryniksy (a three-artist collaborative), Alexander Zhitomirsky, and others. Drawn from an extensive private collection of Soviet propaganda, the exhibition includes more than 160 images.

Co-curated by Abbott Gleason and Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Alexander Zhitomirsky, Hysterical War Drummer, 1948

Location Gallery and Lobby, John Hay Library, Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library