(Im)Mobile Spaces features recent abstract paintings by Irene Lawrence and Barbara Westermann's sculptural series Tractatus. Barbara Westermann is a sculptor whose work, while echoing the concerns with social and political issues characteristic of conceptual art, bears the simple and reductive forms of minimalism. Irene Lawrence is a painter whose recent work can be loosely described as abstraction, fluid in its formal composition and elusive in its meaning. Nevertheless, when presented together, Westermann's sculpture and Lawrence's painting work in tandem, offering a harmonious visual display of three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms, motion-less and motion-like spatial enclosures, restful and restless surfaces. And it is this visual interplay of their (im)mobile spaces that reinforces a feeling of contraction and expansion, evoking at the same time an overall sense of perpetual circularity and pulsation.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Barbara Westermann, Tractatus, installation view (in process), 1998-99

The 2015 Faculty Exhibition presents new and recent works by 20 artists from across Brown University's faculty at theDavid Winton Bell Gallery. Reflecting the creative, cross-disciplinary spirit that is integral to the arts at Brown, the exhibition features work in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, installation, music, and literary art.

Curated by: Alexis Lowry Murray, Ian Alden Russell

The 2015 NCECA Biennial is an international juried ceramics exhibition organized by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts and presented at the Bell Gallery in conjunction with Lively Experiments, the 49th Annual NCECA Conference, which will be held in Providence from March 25-28. Jurors for this year’s exhibition are Linda Christianson, Minnesota studio potter; Jo-Ann Conklin, Director of the Bell Gallery; and Anders Ruhwald, Head of Ceramics, Cranbrook Academy of Art. From a slate of 1147 entries, the jurors choose fifty works issuing from 22 states and Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, Romania, South Korea and Sweden. Works range from functional pottery to installations with associated video or computer programs.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin Image: detail of Karin Karinson Nilsson, We Take a Deep Breath, 2013

Artists have participated in scientific and artistic explorations of the iconic landscapes of Earth’s polar regions since the late-nineteenth century. Today, the crisis of climate change and the associated threat of ice melt and sea level rise have drawn a legion of international artists to Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. There, they document the beauty and the destruction of the region, in hopes of drawing viewers’ attention to the impending loss and eliciting action toward change.

33° presents the work of six artists: Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard and photographers Olaf Otto Becker (German), Camille Seaman (Native American/African American), James Balog (American), Jean de Pomereu (French), and Iain Brownlie Roy (Scottish). Kirkegaard’s forty-minute soundspace Isfald (Icefall) will be on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery, alongside photographs of glaciers, icebergs, and the Greenland icesheet by Becker and Seaman. Photomurals by Becker, Seaman, Balog, de Pomereu, and Roy will be displayed on the exterior of buildings across Brown’s campus.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Camille Seaman, Breaching Iceberg, Greenland, August 8, 2008

33° extends across campus with photo murals of polar landscapes and animals—by Becker, Seaman, James Balog, Jean de Pomereu, and Iain Brownlie Roy—exhibited on the exterior of university buildings.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: rendering of James Balog, Greenland Ice Sheet, 28 June 2009, Adam Le Winter surveys Birthday Canyon on Prince Enginnering Laboratory, Brook St.

7 Documentarians is drawn from the permanentcollection of the David Winton Bell Gallery and includes both worksseminal to the history of documentary photography and lesser-knownseries by renowned American photographers Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans,Garry Winogrand, Larry Clark, Danny Lyon, Jim Dow, and Jay Wolke.Subjects range from New York City and the rural south in the 1930s; tolife in Texas prisons, days on the streets of New York, and the drugculture in the 1960s; to the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago and baseballstadiums in the U.S. and Canada in the 1980s. The exhibition does notattempt to provide a comprehensive history of twentieth-centurydocumentary photography, rather it illuminates important social andtechnical changes that have affected the genre throughout the century.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Walker Evans, Untitled, from Many are Called (Subway Series), late 1930s

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

With its title taken from the William Butler Yeats poem "To Irelandin the Coming Time," A Measured Quietude explored significantthemes and characteristics of 20th century Irish visual art. The exhibitionprovided abstract images by artists concerned with intimate explorationsof the medium of drawing. Artists in the exhibition are Maude Cotter, Roisin Lewis, Richard Gorman, William McKeown, Fergus Martin, Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, and John Kindness.

A Measured Quietude: Contemporary Irish Drawings was organizedby The Drawing Center in New York City as part of that city's IrishArts Celebration in 1999. The exhibition is supported by grants from theBritish Council, the Cultural Committee in Ireland and the Fifth FloorFoundation.

image: Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, Untitled, 1998

image: Joseph Cornell, Untitled, ca. 1953

A selection of works by recent Brown alumni: Mark Andres, Marina Cappeletto, Deborah Cohen, Barnaby Evans, Jamie Evrard, Judith Foster, J. Harry Howe, Lucia O'Reilly, Maureen Paley, Robin Perl, Maggie Poor, Jeremy Norman, Phillip Ross, Jeffrey Schiff, Marilyn Stern, Betsy Zeldin.

Curated by Elise Meyer

Alison Owen’s works embellish and punctuate the subtle details in aspace. She gathers dust and debris from the exhibition venue for use insprawling wallpaper installations. For her installation in the Bell Gallery lobby, she takes as herstarting point the distinctive grid-filled architecture of the List Art Center (designed by Phillip Johnson). She also draws on the details ofthe rare manuscripts on view in the Hay Library Centennial exhibition(in the adjacent gallery), which resonate with her ornate, hand-madeaesthetic.

Curated by Maya Allison

Curated by Michael Driskel, Leslie Humm Cormier, Maureen Meister, Holly Richardson, John Sawyer, and Richard A. Schindler

Curated by Nancy Versaci and Judith Tolnick

Curated by Judith E. Tolnick

image: James Rosenquist, Campaign, 1965

Among the Breakage features recent paintings by ten Providenceartists. As this sampling suggests, Providence’s creative communitiesare more akin to an archipelago than a single island of “regionalstyle.” Work in this exhibition ranges from hard-edged abstraction tohybrid figurative landscapes and techniques that stretch the verydefinition of painting. Participating artists are Sam Duket, Shawn Gilheeney, Ernest Jolicoeur, Maria Napolitano, Lisa Perez, Ara Peterson, Masha Ryskin, Monica Shinn, Dan Talbot, and Jason Travers. The exhibition was curated by Maya Allison and Neal Walsh.

Curated by Maya Allison and Neal Walsh
image: Ara Peterson, detail from Arcade, 2007

Over the past decade Amy Cutler has created a fantasy world that iswhimsical and childlike, occasionally ominous, and often perplexing. Inspired by stories and images encountered in current events, arthistory, folktales, and personal experiences, Amy Cutler createsexquisitely detailed, enigmatic paintings of women, animals, andhybrid-beings engaged in fantastic, dreamlike activities. Her work hasdrawn associations with fables and fairy tales, dreams and surrealism,and folk art. This traveling exhibition was organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Curated by Lisa Freiman
image: Amy Cutler, Dinner Party, 2002

Includes the work of Robert Bero, Marvin Brown, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Mags Harries, Joel Janowitz, Edward Koren, Flora Natapoff, and Hugh Townley.

A selection of photographs depicting the leisures of summer, from fishing and baseball to restorative relaxation. Works by Harry Callahan, Lucas Foglia, Justin Kimball, Melissa Pinney, Larry Sultan, and Sam Walker are drawn from the Bell Gallery collection.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Justin Kimball, Miracles Hot Springs, California, 2010

The exhibition featured work from the permanent collection by Swedish artist Anders Zorn.

image:The Toast, 1892

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Mao, 1972

Ann Fessler's Close To Home evokes the sights and sounds of the rural Midwest, as it tells the autobiographical tale of a young girl who grew up in a river community and was later propelled—by coincidence, dreams, and fate—to the hometown of her biological mother at the headwaters of the same river. Premiering at the Bell Gallery, the multi-media installation is the latest in a series of works in which the artist addresses issues related to adoption. Fessler's greatest strength may be her ability to comment on highly personal subjects without falling into sentimentality. The videos are poignant and touching, but her intelligence, critical distance, and well-honed sense of humor save them from sentimentality.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: installation view

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the artist's death, theDavid Winton Bell Gallery will present an exhibition and symposium thatre-examines Joseph Beuys's oeuvre in the context of contemporary art andculture. Another View of Joseph Beuys: Multiples from New England Collections includes editioned works—prints, sculptural objects, posters, andpostcards—from a major Rhode Island private collection,supplemented byloans from the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums;Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College; Rhode Island Schoolof Design Museum of Art; and the David Winton Bell Gallery, BrownUniversity.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
Image: installation view at Bell Gallery

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.

Organized by the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.

The exhibition pairs Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to Oscar Wilde's Salome and Odilon Redon's third and final series of illustrations for Gustave Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony.

image: Odilon Redon, J'ai quelquefois apercu dans le ciel comme des formes d'esprits, 1896

Tristan Perich opens at Cohen Gallery on August 23

Audible Spaces presents three sound installations that encourage participants to explore the subtleties of listening. Tristan Perich, Zarouhie Abdalian, and [The User] have each created immersive environments using seemingly uniform sounds that dissolve into tonal, tactile, and temporal variations as participants engage with them. Unified by a shared economy of means, all three projects prompt participants to consider the dynamic relationship between sound, space, and personal subjectivity, while addressing a distinct set of historical, social, and sonic concerns.

Curated by Alexis Lowry Murray
Image: Tristan Perich, Microtonal Wall: 1,500 divisions of four octaves from C3 to C7, 2011

An innovator within the performance art movement of the late 1960s, Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena; lives Los Angeles) has long produced work that explores the self, sexuality, gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, love, life, and death. Assembling an expansive range of artwork and performance-related ephemera, Barbara T. Smith: Proof surveys Smith’s bold experimentation. While her groundbreaking performances have received critical attention, the objects Smith has made over nearly sixty years—many for, or as a result of, performances—are less known. This includes the artist’s radical Xerox works, mixed media assemblages, sculptures, artist’s books, drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos. This survey will celebrate Smith’s incomparable contributions to contemporary art, feminism, performance, and technology.

Before Reflection Begins: Jin Soo Kim, Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Valeska Soares, Marisa Telleria-Diez aims to emphasize the experiential and multi-sensory dimensions of art rather than its visual and aesthetic aspects. In this respect, all the works featured in the exhibit seek to engage the viewers in an experience that goes beyond sheer visual perception; an experience that is primarily bodily and pre-reflective, involving environmental space and body-movement, as well as other senses such as touch, smell, and sound. The participating artists—Jin Soo Kim, Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Valeska Soares, and Marisa Telleria-Diez—each engage different sense-perceptions and raise the question of how meaning derives from sensory experience. By doing so, they reveal in their works pre-verbal, sensual meaning that operates via affection rather than cognition, in a domain of (pre)consciousness rather than rationalization, or, as French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, "before reflection begins...."

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Wolfgang Laib, Milkstone, 1982/88

Fazal Sheikh photographsdisplaced people in Africa, South Asia, andthe Americas. In books and installations, he combines photographs withthe personal testimony of his subjects, producing sustained portraits ofcommunities that address their beliefs and traditions, as well as theirpolitical and economic problems. The current exhibition includes workfrom his latest series—Moksha (Heaven) and Ladli (Beloved Daughters)—which reflect on the position of women in ruralIndia. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with BrownUniversity's Year of India. Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh and associated publications have been made possible by Jane P. Watkins. The exhibition was organized by the Princeton University Art Museum.

image: Jamuna Sarkar, from Moksha

Returning from Paris to New York in 1929, Berenice Abbott was struck by changes in the city, the result of the second great skyscraper boom. Towers crowded the narrow streets of the financial district and fanned out from Grand Central Terminal in midtown. At first independently and then with the support of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and the Museum of the City of New York, Abbott set out to “make a documentary interpretation of the City of New York.” Between 1935 and 1939 Abbott produced in excess of one thousand negatives for the project she would later call Changing New York. The final series included 305 photographs supported by historical data compiled by Abbott’s staff of researchers.

The images displayed here—part of the Bell Gallery collection—are from New York in the 30s and Retrospective, portfolios that were printed by the artist and published by Parasol Press in the late 70s and early 80s.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Gunsmith and Police Department (Lava Gunsmith), ca. 1930

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Greyhound Bus Terminal, 1936

The interactive installation Exchange Fields brings together video projections, sound, dance, poetic text, and sculptural objects, thereby producing a multi-sensory environment and, in the words of the artist, "enabling fields of meaning to emerge." The work was created in collaboration with Dutch dancer and chore-ographer Regina van Berkel, and was commissioned by vision ruhr exhibition, Dortmund, Germany, in 2000.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Bill Seaman, detail from Exchange Fields

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Harold Cohen, Richard H, 1967

Brown Faculty Exhibition, 1981 includes Wendy Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Marilyn Lenkowsky, Marlene Malik, Roger Mayer, Sam Messer, David Storey, and Hugh Townley.

Curated by Nancy Versaci

Established in March 1764, Brown University will celebrate its 250th anniversary from March 2014 thru May 2015. To mark the semiquincentenary, the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department ofVisual Art have come together to celebrate the significant and distinct contributions that alumni from Brown University have made within the visual arts. Six alumni artists have been invited to present their workin solo exhibitions presented throughout the spring semester, 2014.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin, Wendy Edwards, Alexis Lowry Murray, Ian Alden Russell
Image: Paul Ramirez Jonas, The Commons, 2011

Established in March 1764, Brown University will celebrate its 250th anniversary from March 2014 thru May 2015. To mark the semiquincentenary, the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art have come together to celebrate the significant and distinct contributions that alumni from Brown University have made within the visual arts. Six alumni artists have been invited to present their work in solo exhibitions presented throughout the spring semester, 2014.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin, Wendy Edwards, Alexis Lowry Murray, Ian Alden Russell
Image: Taryn Simon, Cyropreservation Unit, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan, from An American index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

Brown University Faculty Artists, 1969 includes the work of Robert Cronin, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, John Jagel, Edward Koren, Hugh Townley, and John Udvardy.

Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future presents a collection of historic and ongoing visions of the future from the nineteenth century until the present day. The exhibition’s content has been drawn from a number of university libraries and private collections, as well as the Swiss state-supported museum of utopia known as the Maison d’Ailleurs (House of Elsewhere). Many of these objects have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Curated by Nathaniel Robert Walker
image: Katherine Roy, View of Industria, 2011

Curated by William Jordy and Christopher Monkhouse, with the Rhode Island Historical Society

Curated by Sam Yates, Marian Moffett, and Lawrence Wodehouse

By Virtue of Excellence presented the work of fifteen Rhode island women artists in a diverse array of media. Those exhibiting included: Rhoda Bailey, Reenie Schmerl Barrow, Beth Clarke, Cynthia deGroat, Deb Fanelli, Nancy Friese, Holly Hughes, Sandy Knight, Irene Lawrence, Laura Sue Phillips, Judith Ribicoff, Anne Morgan Spalter, Ineke van Oudenhoven, Sarah Wayland-Smith, and Arlene Wilson.

By Virtue of Excellence presented the work of Rhode Island women artists, including: Paula Marie Bolduc, Hyun C. Chang, Beth Clarke, Coralie Cooper, Lois Graboys, Kathleen Hancock, Nancy Hart, Maureen Kelman, Linnea Toney Leeming, Penelope Manzella, Olivia B. McCullough, Jacqueline Ott, Sylvia Petrie, Carol Simon Rosenblatt, Jill Scher, Cristin Searles, and Tina Tryforos.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Cape Cod, 1987

Caricature and Its Role in Graphic Satire examines the development of caricature in portraits and its role as an independent genre in engravings, prints, and drawings. This comprehensive survey of graphic satire ranges from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

Curated by Jergen Schulz, Charlene S. Crowley, Johanna Gill, Elizabeth G. Grossman, Ruth Little, Margaret S, Smith, and Beeke Sell

Considered to be one of the artist’s most important bodies of work, Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series interweaves themes of race, class, gender, friendship, love, loss, power, and motherhood. The intimate and often political content of these images finds common ground around the kitchen table, transcending the separation of domestic and civic space. First exhibited in 1990, the Kitchen Table Series set the stage for future contemporary artists to explore issues of identity.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin with Rica Maestas
Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Gelatin silver print.

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, Weems renders historical moments uncanny to draw out the complexities of racial and gendered violence. 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.

Mexican-American artist Celia Alvarez Munoz creates a special exhibition combining a site-specific installation with a survey of recent work. Munoz draws on her rich Mexican-American heritage to tell "stories" in words and pictures about the most universal but also the most personal themes—identity, gender, family, childhood, language. Explaining that each of her works dictates its own medium, she has produced everything from eleganlty designed boxed books to mixed media installations. What gives Munoz's work its particular edge is her decision to use spareness, formal restraint, and wit to express emotional, often highly-charged subject matter. It is perhaps because of this intriguing contrast between "medium and message" and the obvious need to avoid easy categorizations of her work that she has been compared to an especially diverse range of artists, from Lorna Simpson to Joseph Cornell to Sophie Calle.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Image from "Which Came First?": Enlightenment #4, 1982

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.

More Like a Dream Than a Scheme is comprised of free-standing assemblage and lamp-like objects hung from the ceiling and walls, creating a magical play of light and shadows throughout the space. Densely installed, the exhibition elicits the feeling of a magical underworld. The title itself—More Like a Dream Than a Scheme—further underlines a dreamy and poetic quality of the works.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Charles Long, Planet Street, 2005

In a broad overview of the conditions throughout western Europe under which painters and sculptors learned their craft, Children of Mercury: Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of art education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Curated by Jeffrey Muller, Chittima Amornpichetkul, J. Duncan Berry, Mary Braun-Anderson, Gabriele Bleeke-Byrne, Anne Dawson, Evonne Levy, Victoria Potts, Patricia Lynn Price, Cynthia Roman, Laurie Rubin, and Laura Olmstead Tonelli

For more than a decade Chris Jordan has focused his and our attention on the consequences of mass consumerism—photographing mountains of discarded electronics in landfills and, more recently, the decomposing carcasses of Laysan albatross that have died from ingesting plastic. The latter images, included here, are difficult and important. Translating unimaginable statistics — 299 million tons of plastics produced a year; 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean; a million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals killed annually from plastic in our oceans — into intimate images of life and death, Jordan confronts us with the consequences of our lifestyle and calls on us to take action toward change.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Chris Jordan, Untitled from Midway

Sculptors on Paper presents prints and drawings by ten post minimal and pop artists known primarily for working in three dimensions. Part of a series highlighting objects from the David Winton Bell Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition sheds light on the parallel, often under-recognized practices of these artists, and provides an intimate lens into their working methods.

Curated by Alexis Lowry Murray and Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1967

This exhibition of works on paper from the permanent collection is organized around the David Winton Bell Gallery’s recent acquisition of twelve Hilla and Bernd Becher duotone lithographs, Framework Houses, (1970/1993). In 1959 the Bechers began meticulously documenting Germany’s industrial landscape and arranging groups of like images into gridded typologies. Their use of serial order and the grid as organizing principles paralleled the systematic procedures deployed by many minimalist and conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. This exhibition features work by the Bechers alongside that of Jennifer Bartlett, Agnes Martin, and Frank Stella.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin and Alexis Lowry Murray

Image: Hilla and Bernd Becher, Holzhäuser Straße 2, Allendorf, 1973/1993

Numerous exhibitions have examined to varying degrees the now-fluid boundaries between painting and sculpture. Color in Space highlights a specific and important aspect of the transtion from the painterly sensibility from its traditional identification with the wall to the occupation of a position in space as sculpture. Covering the period from the early 1960s to the 1990s, the Bell gallery included the work of fourteen artists who emphasize the important role of color in the transformation of pictorial ideas into three-dimensional space. These fourteen artists were Jennifer Bartlett, John Chamberlain, Willie Cole, Vernon Fisher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Graves, Ruth Hardinger, Oliver Herring, Ellsworth Kelly, Wendy Lehman, Italo Scanga, Jessica Stockholder, Anne Truitt and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Co-curated by Diana L. Johnson and George Hofmann
image: John Chamberlain, Debonaire Apache, 1991

Commitment to the Struggle: The Art of Sue Coe includes drawingsand prints on such varied topics as the Ku Klux Klan, apartheid, MalcolmX, and skinheads; AIDS; labor and sweatshop conditions; war and theeconomic interests of the petrochemical industry; and vivisection, animalrights, and the American meat industry. Coe powerful illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Time,Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, National Lampoon, and Artforum, among other publications.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Cross your heart and hope to die, 1997

Crafting the Medici places portraits of the Medici family in the context of the breadth of Florentine craftsmanship, in media ranging from painting to printmaking, gold- and silversmithing, leatherwork, and textile manufacture all in the service of crafting a public image for the Medici rulers. From the time of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo I—who ruled Florence beginning in 1537—until the last Medici died in 1737, the Medici were absolute rulers of one of the most luxurious and powerful courts in Italy. Made in the years following the establishment of Medici rule in 1537, the extremely formal lineage portraits (some of them of infants and young children) were designed to show dynastic succession and provided painters with "authorized" models from which to make any number of copies whenever needed.

Curated by Catherine Caneva, Jo-Ann Conklin, Evelyn Lincoln, and Catherine W. Zerner

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Installation View, 1996

Imi Hwangbo and Jae Ko’s abstract works share an elegant simplicity andbeauty. Both artists work with simple materials and employlabor-intensive methods. In this they exemplify a current movement ofartists who are at ease with technology and instantaneity but seek thehand-crafted and laborious. In addition, the artists draw on theirKorean heritage referencing the country's famed papercrafts and decorative arts.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Imi Hwangbo, Peri, 2007

Beginning in 2006, Daniel Heyman traveled to Jordan and Turkey with American lawyers to meet with former detainees of Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. As he listened to their testimony, Heyman drew their portraits surrounded by his transcription of their words. Later, he recorded the testimony of Iraqi victims and survivors of the Blackwater/Nisour Square shootings of September 2007. Heyman’s painted portraits function equally well as powerful documentary statements and within the tradition of artists’ responses to war (from Callot, Goya, Kollwitz, and Picasso, to others).

The exhibition also includes Heyman's personal response to the war in Iraq: a monumental etching on plywood entitled When Photographers are Blinded, Eagles' Wings are Clipped (2010). The work unites a number of expressionistic and symbolic elements which coalesce into a warning about censorship and the potential decline of American democracy.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Daniel Heyman, From the Time of Morning Prayers, 2008

Danny Lyon once described the writer James Agee as, “a romantic who adored reality,” an epithet equally apt to describe him. Lyon made a name for himself in the 1960s with an embedded style of reportage, capturing a compelling beauty in the people and places he befriended across the country, from student leaders of the civil rights movement to convicts in Texas prisons. Drawn primarily from the Bell Gallery collection, The Only Thing I Saw Worth Leaving presents photographs from some of Lyon’s most significant series along with films and other work, organized around five principles that he refers to time and again: empathy, freedom, history, destruction, and narrative.

Curated by Allison Pappas
Image: Danny Lyon, Arrest of Eddie Brown, Albany, Georgia, 1962. Copyright Danny Lyon/Magmun Photos

The David Winton Bell Gallery is pleased to present a mid-career survey of Dave Cole’s sculptural practice. This exhibition will focus on Cole’s exploration of notions of childhood in America. It will present such monumental works as Music Box (2012), a vintage 1980s CAT CS-553 steamroller that has been refashioned into a giant music box that plays the first stanza of the national anthem, and Fiberglass Teddy Bear (2003), knit from iconic pink Owens Corning Fiberglas. While both works are whimsical and fun, resembling giant children’s toys, they are also poignant reminders of the intimate relationship between the construction of national identity and infrastructure building in the United States. In knitting industrial materials such as Fiberglas, lead, and Fiberfrax porcelain into quotidian objects such as teddy bears and baby blankets, Cole presents a literal portrait of the fabric of American life. Opening Reception, 5:30pm, May 8th, 2015 in List Art Lobby.

Image: Dave Cole, The Music Box, 2012

David Nash is best known for his sculptures in wood and his environmental works situated in nature. He uses fallen tree trunks that he cuts, carves, burns, blasts, and sands into monolithic and totem-like forms. Made variously from oak, elm, redwood, and lime wood, all found in Wales, Nash’s sculptures fluctuate between organic and geometric shapes and range in height from two to eight feet. The wood is often charred, which gives the surface a rich texture that is both rough and elegant. The process of charring, or burning, transforms wood into carbon (a mineral), thus altering not only the surface texture, but also the basic nature of the material. Box Cross and the three-part sculpture Cube, Sphere, Pyramid (2000), on view in this lobby, were created using this charring technique. The drawings that accompany Cube, Sphere, Pyramid were made with the charcoal residue left over after burning the sculptures.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view

The exhibition featured the silver dye-bleach (llfochrome) photographs of engineer turned photographer David Ricci. The photographs turn mundane, often garish, sites into dense images. Intense color and geometry unite to produce works that at first glance are enticing and visually accessibl, but their order and elegance masks an underlying tension.

image: Wonderland Pier, Ocean City, NJ, September 28, 1993, 1:13 p.m., 1993

At a time when natural history museums are moving away from taxidermy, a resurgence of interest has been manifest in the popular culture—in internet blogs and image collections, in fashion and commercial advertising—and in the visual arts. Dead Animals surveys current artistic usage of taxidermy through the work of eighteen artists: Maurizio Cattelan, Kate Clark, Mark Dion, Nicholas Galanin, Thomas Grünfeld, Damien Hirst, Karen Knorr, Annette Messager, Polly Morgan, Deborah Sengl, Angela Singer, Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir/Mark Wilson, Richard Barnes, Jules Greenberg, Sarah Cusimano Miles, Richard Ross, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The exhibition and accompanying symposium will examine the cultural history of taxidermy, social factors that have contributed to artists’ interests in the “idea of the animal,” and the ways in which these interests are manifest in artists’ works. It will question how taxidermy, with its inherent association with death, differs from the use of live animals or animal substitutes such as stuffed animals, and why taxidermy may be particularly relevant to the exploration of the human-animal question. Finally, it will examine ethical issues surrounding the incorporation of animals in art.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Thomas Grünfeld, Misfits (penguin/peacock), 2005. Copyright 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Definitive Statements: American Art 1964-66 examines the consequence of Pop, Color Field, and Minimalism in American Art in the period 1964 to 1966.

Curated by Kermit S. Champa, Christopher Campbell, Ima Ebong, Megan Fox, Mitchell F. Merling, Michael Plante, and Jennifer Wells

Diana Al-Hadid’s works are distinctive in style and material. Drawing inspiration from classical and Renaissance imagery, Al-Hadid creates towering sculpture, spectral wall pieces, ethereal drawings and experimental bronzes that foreground her unusual use of materials.

The exhibition takes its title from a central work, Phantom Limb, a term referring to the sensations that a missing arm or leg is still present, and able to move. The title captures the character of much of Al-Hadid’s work, which evokes memory and long cultural history through a visceral, materially-focused working technique.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Diana Al-Hadid, detail of Phantom Limb, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Copyright Diana Al-Hadid. Photo Oliver Ottenschleager

The exhibition features three of Suh's architectural installations,all relating to his New York apartment: the cumbersomely titled 348West 22nd St., Apt A, New York, NY 10011 and 348 West 22nd St.,Apt A, New York, NY 10011 (corridor), from 2000 and 2001, respectively,and Staircase, 2003. Staircase was created specifically for the ListArt Center Lobby;other versions of the piece were created for the Istanbul Biennale anda group exhibition at the Artsonje Center, Seoul.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Staircase, 2003

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Dominoes, 1990

An exhibition of paintings by RISD faculty Donnamarie Bruton is part of afaculty exchange between Brown's Department of Visual Art and RISD'sPainting Department. Bruton paints with a lush, jewel-like palette: redsplay against gold, lapis blue is accented by a white. Bruton's subject is for living spaces. Moving often, she undertook thesepaintings as a way of documenting her home. Recognizable objects andclearly defined three-dimensional spaces are often layered with abstractelements and stations indicating the artist's preoccupation with thedichotomies of physical and metaphysical, spiritual and material,tangible and intangible.The works in Donnamaria Bruton: Interiors explore interior spaces, specificially Bruton's living spaces. Recognizably objects and clearly defined three-dimensional spaces are often layered with abstract elements and spaces, indicating Bruton's preoccupation with the dichotomies of physical and metaphysical, spiritual and material, tangible and intangible.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

Photographs from the 1930-1950s by Dorothy Norman, including portraits of Alfred Stieglitz, Bertolt Brecht and Marc Chagall, as well as landscapes and still lives. Drawn from the permanent collection.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Georgia O'Keeffe Painting with Light Bulb, 1936

Curated by Catherine W. Zerner, Janetta R. Benton, Richard Campbell, George L. Gorse, John V. Quarrier, Michael Slavin, Susan E. Strauber, Christine I. Schwartz, Claire F. Tyler, and Anne Wagner

Selected from the vast holdings of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, The Netherlands, this exhibition of seventy-five drawings and related prints by the master of Japanese printmaking utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) is the first major presentation of the artist's drawings in the United States. Although Kuniyoshi favored heroic and dramatic subject matter, his enormous output includes representations of many different subjects: landscapes, women, theatrical scenes, animals, and comic characterizations. Curated by the Rijksmuseum, the exhibition is circulating in the United States under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

image: Cats Drinking Tea, 1840s

More than a dozen life-size figures by the renowned hyper-realist sculptor Duane Hanson will take etheir places in the Gallery. This controversial master of illusionism has explained that he is "...not duplicating life, [but] making a statement about human values." Exhibitions of Hanson's work have attracted large crowds, as audiences indulge their natural human tendency to "people-watch" without getting caught. But watching Hanson's people is disquieting, for, with some exceptions, they carry the burdens of life heavily. This exhibition has been organized by the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art at The Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansans.

image: Self-Portrait and Model, 1979

Curated by Evelyn Lincoln
image: Pietro Testa, The Three Marys at the Tomb of Jesus, 1611

Curated by Anneliese Harding

Curated by Kermit Champa, Nancy A. Austin, Horace Brockinton, Kathryn L. Bush, Pamela M. Jones, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Elizabeth A. Reid, Marianne Ruggiero, and Meredith J. Strong

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.

As the final exhibition of the 1990-1991 season, the David Winton Bell Gallery presented Elizabeth Murray: Prints, the first comprehensive show of this highly regarded New York painter's graphic work. Organized by the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston and circulated by the New England Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition included work from 1979 to the present. As a counterpoint to the prints, the Bell Gallery supplemented the circulating exhibition with a powerful group of paintings and drawings from private collections on the East Coast.

Curated by Barbara Krakow
image: Sniff, 1984

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Walter Feldman, Reliquary of Auschwitz, 1997

The diverse exhibition focuses on recent works by faculty members from the Department of Visual Art and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Research in Modern Culture and Media. The artists work in a variety of media. Pieces on display ranged from videos to sculpture–in one instance created of steel and stone, in another of found objects and duct tape–handmade books, paintings, prints, and a computer assisted installation. The artists participating in the exhibition are Paul Badger, Leslie Bostrom, Tony Cokes, Wendy Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Khalid Kodi, Marlene Malik, Roger Mayer, Jerry Mischak, Francois Poisson, David Reville, Janos Stone, and Leslie Thornton.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Richard Fishman, Nephrite Headrest, 1999-2000

Faculty from the departments ofVisual Art and Modern Culture and Media will show recent work in the Faculty Triennial. Artists featured are Leslie Bostrom, Tony Cokes,Susan Doyle, Wendy Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, KennethHorii, Nina Katchadourian, Sarah Malakoff, Marlene Malik, Roger Mayer,Fraser Stables, Rachel Stevens, Daniel Stupar, Leslie Thornton, andJudyth van Amringe.

The Faculty Exhibition is a triennialmultimedia event showcasing recent works of faculty members and visitinginstructors from the departments of Visual Art and Modern Culture andMedia. This year’s exhibition will include work by Joan Backes,Leslie Bostrom, Tony Cokes, Kerry Coppin, Susan Doyle, Wendy Edwards,Brad Ewing, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Kirsten Lamb, MarleneMalik, Jane Masters, Joe Milutis, Paul Myoda, Jay Stuckey, DanielStupar, Leslie Thornton, Mark Tribe, and Lisa Young.

image: Leslie Bostrom, Study for Bird Disaster #10, 2005

Faculty Exhibition, 1986 includes the work of Tony Ascrizzi, Wendy Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Miriam Hitchcock, Gregory Little, Marlene Malik, Hugh Townley, and Debra Weier.

The David Winton Bell Gallery presents Faculty Triennial 2010 featuring work by 24 faculty artists from five departments. Prior to thisyear, the faculty exhibition featured work from only twodepartments—Visual Art and Modern Culture and Media. This yearsexhibition reflects the cross-disciplinary practice that is an integralpart of the arts at Brown.

Curated by Maya Allison
image: Artist Todd Winkler in Glint, his immersive installation

False Witness includes installations by three artists—Joan Fontcuberta and the team of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick—whose work is grounded in the idea of the malleability of history, memory, and fact. Working with photography and texts (injected with a great deal of humor), they turn our belief in the truthfulness of photographs against us and create elaborate hoaxes that falsify historic events.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: installation view of Kahn and Selesnick, Transmissions from the Schottensumpfkunftig, 2001

Born in Iskenderun, on the Turkish-Syrian border, Fatma Bucak makes videos, performances, photographs, and installations that grapple with the poetics and pragmatics of borders—their structure, implications, and human consequences. Previous works from the Turkish-Armenian border, the Mexican-U.S. border, the Dakhla refugee camp in Western Sahara, and the Tuz Gölü in central Anatolia are presented alongside a series of new works addressing media censorship, state violence, and mass migration. This exhibition is Bucak’s East Coast premiere.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Fatma Bucak, Still from Untitled, 2016. HD video, sound. Courtesy of the artist.

María Berrio, Zoë Charlton, and Joiri Minaya create multimedia collages that depict bodies enveloped by nature, often juxtaposing the garden and the wild. Fertile Ground brings their aesthetically and conceptually layered works together to explore the relationship between body and land and challenge romantic tropes with powerful personal, cultural, and political narratives. While each artist has a different reason for choosing her imagery, all engage with issues of race, class, power, ownership, and freedom.

Curated by: Heather Bhandari
Image: Zoë Charlton, The Country a Wilderness Unsubdued, 2018

Festivities: Ceremonies and Celebrations in Western Europe 1500-1790 surveys the broad and complex topic of festive art and examines a broad variety of festival types in Europe from the early Renaissance through the Baroque and Rococo.

Curated by Winslow Ames, David Harvey Ball, Marianne Elizabeth Legg, Karen Dimartino Mensel, Joyce Elizabeth Nalewajk, and Christine Margit Sperling

Works from the late seventies to the present are included in a major show of dramatically toned and fogged silver prints by this highly respected Rhode Island artist. Ranging in subject matter from architecture, landscape, and construction sites to ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs and medieval Yugoslavian frescoes, Moer's images are representational yet suggestive of an imaginative counter world to contemporary reality.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: An Unsettled Place, 1989-1990

Film Architecture presents some of the manifold examples of the interactions and correlations among film, architecture, and urban planning. Concentrating on the depiction of urban visions in film, the exhibition introduces examples of the dialogue between film and architecture during the past seventy-five years in the form of sketches, paintings, models, photographs, and film clips from archives and private collections in Europe and the United States. These works, many of which have never been exhibited in the United States, help document the major roles of film architecture: as a reflection and commentary on actual contemporary architectural practice, as a testing ground for innovative, often visionary ideas, and as a realm for non-traditional approaches to the art and discipline of architecture.

Curated by Dietrich Neumann
image: Harrison Ellenshaw, Peter Ellenshaw, Paul Lasaine, Michael Lloyd, David Mattingly, Michael Moen, Panorama of the city, 1990

As the summer months unfold, the David Winton Bell Gallery is pleased to present Flora, an exhibition of works on paper from the permanent collection. This eclectic group of photographs, drawings, and etchings re-imagines the traditions of landscape painting, still life, and floral portraiture through unconventional techniques and unusual subjects, while bringing together unexpected works by well-known artists.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

Image: Tom Baril, Three Poppies

Includes the work of Edward J. Armour, Walter Feldman, Robert S. Neuman, and Hugh Townley.

Curated by Jonathan Lipman
image: lobby of Administration Building, Johnson Wax, 1952

Bursting with color, texture, and organic form, the intensely personal work of Franklin Williams (b. 1940 in Ogden, UT; lives and works in Petaluma, CA) sustains a tension between figuration and abstraction. In rigorous yet whimsical artworks, Williams evokes familial and romantic love, death, sorrow, lust, and humor quite tenderly, with motifs and shapes intimately bound by a symbolism that has spanned his decades long career.

Friedrich St.Florian: A Retrospective includes more than eightyarchitectural drawings, sketches, designs, and models, and spans thearchitect's career from the early 1960s to the present, exploring his"imaginary architecture," residential and commercial projects,competition entries, and design for the World War II Memorial inWashington, D.C. The exhibition celebrates St.Florian at the time of hisretirement from teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design and onthe occasion of his award of a Doctorate of Fine Arts honoris causa from Brown University at its 238th commencement.

Curated by Dietrich Neumann and Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Friedrich St. Florian, New York Birdcage—Imaginary Architecture, 1968

Curated by Judith E. Tolnick

A series of x-rays. Bright white spots record exposure of the film to pieces of trinitite by Gabriel Martinez. Named after “Trinity” — the site of the first atomic weapon detonation in 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico — trinitite is created when an atomic bomb explodes over gypsum sands, fusing the granules into a radioactive glass. Gabriel Martinez’s grandmother collected the trinitite after the blast.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Gabriel Martinez, Jar of Trinitite (Taster's Choice/Proving Ground), 2015. Digital print. Courtesy of the artist. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace, San Antonio.

In continuing celebration of Brown University’s 250 anniversary, The David Winton Bell Gallery presents Going Nowhere: Alumni Artists in Providence. For Going Nowhere, Peter Glantz '98, Kevin Hooyman '98, Xander Marro '98, Jenny Nichols '01, David Udris '90, and Tatyana Yanishevsky '05 have each produced new works in practices that range from printmaking to performance. Here, narratives of the simple and fantastic are complicated by tensions between wildness and structure, density and ephemerality, and specificity and largeness.

Curated by Jori Ketten '02, with Alexis Lowry Murray '07

Image: Kevin Hooyman, Speed Demons, 2013, Ink and watercolor on paper

Curated by Tony Hackens, Rolf Winkes, Marie Jeannine Aquilino, Margaret Barry, Audrey R. Gup, Boyd T. Hill, William E. Mierse, Morag Murray, Ivette M. Richard, Richard W. Sadow, Ellen S. Spencer, Sabine Cornells, Francois de Callatay, Frederique de Cuyper, Myriam Destree, Andre Dumont, Christiane Larock, Rancine Lecomte, Anne Catherine Lemaigre, Bernadette Schuiten, and Agnes Stoffel

Curated by Ellen Lawrence, Lisa Bartley, Eleanor Clapp, Sally Danto, Carrie Feder, Marcie Freedman, Lynn Henry, and Christine Leamon

Curated by Nancy Versaci and Judith Tolnick

Acclaimed conceptual photographer Hank Willis Thomas is known for commandeering American advertising strategies in order to challenge constructions of race and gender in the United States. For several years he has also been appropriating the historical artifacts of past social struggles, from the holocaust, to the civil rights movement, to apartheid, and transforming these records into primary sources that can speak for today’s cultural conflicts. Thomas is particularly drawn to certain hand gestures that are universally legible as acts of protest. He isolates these non-verbal modes of communication from documentary photographs and reconfigures them into sculptures and retro-reflective prints that offer compelling moments of agency and resistance. The Bell Gallery will bring together these resonant gestures alongside mixed media sculptures and a five-channel video installation. The work included in this exhibition communicates contemporary acts of protest even as they are mediated through the events of history.

Curated by Alexis Lowry Murray

Image: Hank Willis Thomas, Amandla, 2013

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.

With his varied series of satirical prints, William Hogarth (1600-1764) created a broad public patronage for a new kind of art that appealed to the values of a progressive urban middle class. These works, which Hogarth termed his “modern moral subjects,” were series of narrative compositions designed for reproduction through engravings. A Rake’s Progress (1725) describes the dismal fate of Thomas Rakewell, a wealthy young man who squanders his inheritance and eventually winds up in a lunatic asylum. Drawn from the collection of the Bell Gallery.

image: A Rake's Progress, plate 3, 1735

Curated by Elizabeth Mongan

Including photographs by Jim Goldberg, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jack Radcliffe, and Kathy Vargas. Organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Hospice Foundation.

image: Nan Goldin, Emilia, Brooklyn, 1994

Howard Ben Tre: New Work featuring new cast glass sculptures, working drawings, models, and finished works on paper by this artist known for his innovative, large-scale architectonic forms.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Paired Forms 4, 1993

Poems by I.J. Kapstein and prints by his daughter Judith K. Brodsky.

Images focusing on the broad theme of the family and family relationships are becoming more and more popular at a time when the traditional nuclear family itself seems to be in crisis. Imaging the Family features the photographs of Tina Barney, Lorie Novak, and Larry Sultan. These three photographers have in common their highly effective use of color and scale and their selection of their own, "typical" family (and friends) as subject. Beyond these points of similarity, however, each of these artists has a very personal vision through the myriad and complex aspects of family life are illuminated.

image: Lorie Novak, The Barbecue, 1983

in and around us features the works of Olivia Bernard, PeterCrump, Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, Jamey Morrill, Allison Paschke, andJessica Deane Rosner—six artists who live and work in the New Englandarea. The exhibition title refers to the phenomenal world around us—itsvisible appearances, shapes, and colors—and the psychic world inside ofus—our mental or psychological constitution. All of the exhibited worksengage both of those worlds, 'in' and 'around' us; some depict theperceptual and recognizable elements of actual reality, whereas othersaddress private and emotional states of inner-self.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view with the work of Jehanne-Marie Gavarini

A joint project of the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art, in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE features ten installations by established and emerging artists. The Bell Gallery prepared a four-part exhibition, presenting an installations by renowned American artist Fred Wilson, French artist Xavier Veilhan, New York artist Sharon Louden, and Chilean artist Magaly Ponce. The Department of Visual Art invited Peggy Diggs, Laura Evans, and subRosa, a feminist performance group.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view of work by Fred Wilson

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

Works of art in all media, from painting and sculpture to video and holography, will be included in the largest faculty exhibition ever presented at the Gallery. Thirteen artists will exhibit recent work and works created expressly for this show. The artists are Leslie Bostrom, Cynthia Crosby, Wendy V. Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Annie Goldson, Marlene Malik, Roger Mayer, Jerry Mischak, Mira Schor, Donald Thornton, Leslie Thornton, and Hugh Townley.

image: Hugh Townley, Sen. Helms' Cockeyed Glasses, 1990

Ink, Paper, Metal, and Wood presents eighty works by more than fifty artists. While the exhibition focues on printmaking of the highest quality and imagination, there is a parallel focus on the presentation of a wide variety of printing techniques. It is the intention of the show to use fine prints by highly regarded contemporary artists to "illustrate" the exciting and at times complex printing methods available today. From traditional methods like woodcut and etching to the inventive use of commercial techniques like photoetching, photogravure, and airbrush, the works in Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood exhibit the results of highly successful collaboration between artists and printers.

Curated by Kathan Brown
image: John Baldessari, Six Colorful Gags (Male), 1991

A multimedia exhibition that includes video projections, sculptural installations, painting and wall drawing, InVisible Silence was inspired by the late writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, especially his unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible. The exhibition explores his notion of silence, not as muteness, lack of content, or absence of meaning, but rather as a background of language, operating non-verbally via implicit, sensible meanings. The aim of the exhibition is to present works, which although diverse in their concepts, approaches and media, embody this notion of silence and evoke a feeling of speechless, sensuous knowing. Artists included are: Yael Bartana of Israel, Sandra Cinto of Brazil, Regi Müller of Switzerland, Yoshihiro Suda of Japan, Su-Mei Tse of Luxembourg, and Fred Sandback and Kate Shepherd of the United States.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Su-Mei Tse, Echo, 2003

Curated by Roger Mayer

Curated by Nancy R. Versaci and Judith E. Tolnick

Jana Sterbak: Metamorphosis includes a series of recent works, documenting the artist's thought process and her working method. Chief among the themes explored here are a continued interest in the absurdist plight of humankind, in clothing as metaphor, and in a newly discovered interest in Asian culture.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Absorption, 1995

As a contemporary American sculptor, Jene Highstein has concentrated his efforts in outdoor sculpture and site-specific installations, as well as sculpting works in a variety of materials: wood, marble, cast iron, bronze, concrete, plaster, and even silk. Highstein's recently created red cedar carving and four large-scale drawings are featured in a continuing series of artists' installations for the David Winton Bell gallery, funded by the Albert and Vera List Endowment Fund.

image: Small Temple, Installation View, 1989

Organized and sponsored by the Swarovski Cultural Affairs Program and presented by The Providence Jewelry Museum.

image: Franz Zasche, Jablonec, and Nisou, Brooch, c. 1900-1905

A new installation by Jin Shan 靳山

A leading voice in an emerging generation of socially engaged contemporary artists in China, Shanghai-based Jin Shan is an agent provocateur. Preferring wit and satire to aggression and conflict, his work uses humor and play to draw audiences into a confrontation with the social, cultural and political problems of the modern world. In this special project for the Bell Gallery, Jin Shan responds to power dynamics in contemporary China, invoking the social meme "My dad is Li Gang!" — a short-hand satirical critique of the corrupt financial and political elite of China who believe they can avoid responsibility for harm they have inflicted on others. My dad is Li Gang! is a declaration of Jin Shan's cultural position and social obligation as an artist to engage political issues and make them visible. His most ambitious project to date, My dad is Li Gang! will see Jin Shan realize a single, large-scale installation in the main gallery of the David Winton Bell Gallery. This will be Jin Shan's second solo exhibition in the United States and occurs in conjunction with his first New York gallery solo show at Masters & Pelavin.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
image: Jin Shan, My dad is Li Gang! 我爸是李刚! [detail], 2012 (Photo: Zhong Han 钟晗)

Curated by Betty Klausner

Song of Transformation includes two sculptural sound installations by composer and artist Joe Diebes. Conceived as companion pieces, Sound Field (2003), and Aviary (2004), speak to a confluence of nature and technology, which the artist views as neither progressive nor pernicious. "I'm imagining a division of reality into the fabricated world in which we live and some kind of natural environment that precedes it," says Diebes.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: installation view of Joe Diebes, Sound Field

Curated by Joel Shapiro and Wiliam Jordy

A native of Providence, Rhode Island, John C Gonzalez makes art with other people. Broadly concerned with processes of collaboration, his project-based artworks often involve painting, sculpture, and performance and emerge from the daily routines of the institutions and organizations in which he is invited to work. Presenting a new project conceived for Brown University alongside a survey of past projects, this is Gonzalez’s first major solo exhibition in Providence.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: John C Gonzalez, Home Depot House (process photograph), 2013

Extreme Horiticulture includes photographs taken over the last three years in private and public gardens around the US. Continuing the artist's interest in nature and man's effects on nature, the exhibition illustrates nature at its most rigorously controlled: in landscaped and manicured gardens throughout the United States. Subjects range from the sublimely beautifulBirch Allee at Stan Hywet Gardens in Akron, Ohio, to the ridiculous Fifty-foot Inchworm, an azalea topiary at Cypress Gardens, Florida.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Fern Garden with Topiary, Lotusland, Montecito, CA, 2000

Curated by Nancy Versaci, Hugh Davies, and Carl Belz

Ancient Stones was mounted in conjuction with Convergence X, Providence's 10th international art festival. The exhibition includes platinum and silver prints of Scottish stone circles, cairns, duns, and standing stones. The photographs included in the exhibition were taken during a hiking trip to Scotland in the summer of 1995.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Interior, Tioram Castle, Ardnamurchan Peninsula, Scotland, 1995

JUKAI is an architectural environment by Japanese artist Yumi Kori, conceived specifically for the Bell Gallery. Accompanied by a sound installation by Austrian composer and sound artist Bernhard Gal, this site-specific piece tests the limits of sensory experience, spatial and temporal.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view of JUKAI

The exhibition features paintings and sculpture by Olitski, focusing on a major phase of the artist's development during the critical period of the sixties and early seventies. Olitski made his first stain paintings in the early sixties and during the spring of 1964 he developed the spray painting technique which which he is most closely identified. It was through these stained and sprayed canvases of the sixties that he redefined for contemporary painting the relationship between surface and support, color and field.

image: Sacred Courtesan Blue, 1962

Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Le Blanc Mesnil, France, lives Paris) has reimagined his French Pavillion from the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) for The Bell: an immersive video and archipelagic sculptural installation that extends his focus on water as a site of both historical and contemporary traumas and emancipatory futures.

While Still Before Us After All places Kai Franz’s art in conversation with the architecture of List Art Building, designed by iconic American modernist Philip Johnson. New sculptures included here were conceived in response to the grids of concrete, stone, and wood in the List Art lobby. The sculptures are reminiscent of the texture and tone of Brutalist concrete architecture, yet the variability and dynamics of their forms appear organic and expressive.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Kai Franz, Reset, 2017. CNC-code, CAM-software, plopper (dual-axis precision deposition system), polyurethane, sand.

This exhibition includes two of Kozyra's video installations, "Bathhouse" and "Men's Bathhouse," both filmed at the bathhouse of the Hotel Gellert in Budapest. The installations raise questions about gender, voyeurism, and narcissism, as well as concepts of beauty and aging. Kozyra is part of a generation of young female artists who revolutionizedthe Polish art scene in the 1990s. These women have discarded the traditionalsubject matter of locality and ethnicity, instead engaging issues offeminist discourse—including identity, the body, female physicality,the contemporary concept of beauty and the other, thus moving Polishart into the realm of internationalism.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: still from Bathhouse, 1997

An installation of several thousand handmade ceramic objects and several hundred jars of local produce canned by the artist, Breaking Even expands upon Kelli Rae Adams's ongoing investigations of materiality, process, labor, and value. In this project for the Bell Gallery and her first solo exhibition, Adams addresses the current economic moment, particularly as it relates to creative endeavors, offering a participatory inquiry into the nature of value and the mechanisms through which we receive and quantify the work and energies of others.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Kelli Rae Adams, Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru [Detail], 2010

The extended series of photographs that Kerry Stuart Coppin has brought together under the title Materia Oscura/Dark Matter, dating from 1990 to 2005, portrays Africans and African descendents, and their environments—the architecture of their homes, the streets they inhabit, and the landscape that surrounds them. Through these images, Coppin asks us to consider the formation of a trans-Atlantic Black African identity, encompassing the Americas, the Carribean, and West Africa.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Black Men Leaning to Fly

Julie Blackmon, Jill Greenberg, and Ruud van Empel photograph children,creating fictional images that elicit reactions ranging from amusementto astonishment to shock. While photography of children is as old as themedium itself, the works in this exhibition represent a recent approachaided by digital techniques. Each of these artists uses digitaltechniques to separate photography from its associations with reality.Blackmon collages elements and Greenberg draws on the images. Van Empeluses the most elaborate techniques, building his images element byelement and often compiling more than 100 individual elements in asingle image. Extending the late-twentieth-century movement toward“fabricated” imagery, they shift photography further and further awayfrom its association with reality

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Julie Blackmon, Gum, 2005

The exhibition, organized and circulated by the Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, includes twenty-five works, four sculptural multiples, and two artist's books by Kiki Smith. Works range in date from the artist's untitled photo silkscreen published by Avocet Editions and the silkscreen, Posession is Nine-tenths of the Law, both done in 1985, to her most recent collaborations with Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island. Formally editioned pieces from ULAE can be compared with those of Smith's direct, personal investigation of alternative printmaking techniques, including Xerox-transfer, non-editioning, and her use of "unique variants."

image: Sueno, 1992

Kim Dingle & the Wild Girls presents a survey of Dingle's work with particular emphasis on her rambunctious and sometimes violent alter-egos, Priss and the Wild Girls. Priss and the Wild Girls are modeled after Wadow Dingle, the artist's niece. Born with brain damage, Wadow was prone to violent outbursts as a child. In one way or another, and often with immense, dark humor, Dingle's art illuminates the role that race, gender, stereotype, and myth play in defining identity.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Hatchet, 1998

Thread on plywood, smoke and foliage, cast pigment on drywall, nail polish on slip-cast porcelain, and electroplated grapevines. Kim Faler’s art is an alchemy of everyday things, cultivating empathy for our ability to apprehend and appreciate beauty in the fleeting moments of life. Through sculpture, installation, photography, and drawing, she makes the mundane mysterious and the common uncanny.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Kim Faler, Detail of Sonder, 2016. Electroplated grapevines (copper, chrome, gold), latex paint, epoxy and steel. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace, San Antonio.

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

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: detail of wall drawing

KirstenHassenfeld's elaborate paper sculpturesdraw on the artist's love of ornamentation and find power through herpainstaking craftsmanship. The product of hundreds of hours of cutting,folding, rolling and coiling, her works have taken the form of jewelsand luxury goods, ornaments and vases, and most recently trees andflowers. 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 hangingsculpture that was commissioned in 2007 by the Rice Art Gallery,Houston, TX.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Blueware, 2009

In the exhibition Labyrinths, three artists-Jan Mancuska, Dominic McGill, and Alyson Shotz-engage the manifold aspects of labyrinth in their own respective way. While McGill focuses on the construction of a social and political chronicle, Shotz focuses on structuring the perceptual environments, and Mancuska on the notion of duration and temporal experience. Despite their different approaches and aesthetic, all three artists incorporate in their works the labyrinthine structure. The winding, unfolding shape of a labyrinth not only illuminates the feeling of puzzlement, but also the means of escape by searching for new meanings and experiences.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view with detail of Alyson Shotz, The Shape of Space

Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and Its Contents discusses the dominant issues in Victorian art, literature, and thought. The exhibition focuses on W. H. Hunt's images of the Lady of Shalott and the rich legacy of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in America and England.

Curated by George P. Landow, Peggy A. Fogelman, Rebecca R. Greenleaf, Patricia McDonnell, Elizabeth Nelson, Miriam Neuringer, Lisa Norris, Timothy R. Rodgers, and Marc Rolnik

Pictures from Home are stills culled from 8mm family movies. They are familiar images. Specific to Sultan’s life, they also possess the quality of cultural icon. They are pictures of the good life: a child running in the backyard, Mom sunbathing, Dad barbequing. Sultan was also fascinated by off moments: a momentary look of worry passing over someone’s face, caught by the camera but probably unrecognized in the moment. Speaking of the films, Sultan has said, “They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events. It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion.”

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Winking Mom, 1984

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.

Although "invented" by the Bavarian writer Alois Senefelder in 1798, the medium of lithography developed most rapidly in France. Lithography came into its own as an expressive medium by the mid-nineteenth century and, given the wide variety of textures and tones which could be acheived, soon became the favored technique of the many painters and sculptors who were also active as printtmakers. This exhibition featured French lithographs from the collection of the Bell Gallery and included artists such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Eugene Delacroix, Nicholas-Toussaint Charlet, Horace Vernet, Edouard Vuillarad, and Henri Matisse.

image: Eugene Delacroix, Hamlet tente de tuer le roi, 1843

Thestruggle to define what it means to be Mexican in an era of rapid changeand instability profoundly affected Mexican art in the twentieth century. Drawn from the Bell Gallery collection—and including works by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Salvador Lutteroth, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Leopoldo Méndez, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, Mariana Yampolsky, and Francisco Zúñiga—the exhibition raises questions about who is allowed, capable, or obligated to create culture. Who has the right to speak for Mexico?

Curated by Rica Maestas
Image: Graciela Iturbide, Mujer Ángel (Angel Woman), 1979. Gelatin silver print.

Shown in conjunction with the conference "Weimar Culture: Crisis of Modernity or German Malaise?," the documentary panel exhibition illuminates the enormous impact of American and Amerikanismus on modern culture and society in Germany after World War I.

image: Umbo, The Roving Reporter, 1926

Curated by Rolf Winkes

A Natural Order focuses on a network of people who have left cities and suburbs to live off the grid in the southeastern United States. Over a four-year period beginning in the summer of 2006, Lucas Foglia met, stayed with, photographed, and recorded copious conversations with people at “rewilding” communities such as Wildroots Earthskills Homestead, at Christian communities such as Russell Creek Community, and with smaller independent groups. His subjects have embraced a self-sufficient lifestyle for varied reasons: religious, environmental or political; liberal or libertarian. They all strive for self-sufficiency and sustainability, but none are totally isolated from the outside. As Foglia tells us, “Many have websites that they update using laptop computers and cell phones that they charge on car batteries or solar panels.”

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Acorn with Possum Stew, Wildroots Homestead, North Carolina, 2006

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

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

image: Zyk, 1987-89

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

Best known for his dramatic paintings, Malangatana is an internationally recognized artist who has produced a broad range of work in diverse mediums—from drawings, murals, ceramics and sculpture, to poetry and music. His exhibition at the Bell Gallery features 15 paintings and 25 drawings, spanning the past 40 years of his career—and, for the first time, introducing his larger creative opus to the North American public. Malangatana's works are frequently commentaries on the historical and political events in his country, including Portuguese colonialism and Mozambique's anti-colonial struggle, civil war and independence. His works explore broad universal themes of violence and resistance to violence, capturing both the hardship of human life and its heroic aspects.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Juizo Final (Final Judgement), 1961

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Story of Pillows I (Histoire des oreillers I), 1995-96

Over the course of five weeks in the spring of 2001, Mark Dion, along with photographer Bob Braine and nearly 90 volunteers, took to the shores, vacant lots, and farmland of New England. The result of these surveys is New England Digs, a multi-process exhibition that involved finding sites in Brockton, Providence, and New Bedford, collecting materials, cleaning them, and re-contextualizing the objects into a final exhibition.

Curated by Lasse Antonsen, Jo-Ann Conklin and Denise Markonish
image: Drawer of swizzle sticks and other materials excavated for New England Digs

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.

Curated by Ronald J. Onorato and Nancy Versaci

For more than twenty-five years Masami Teraoka has created humorous and irreverant commentaries on contemporary culture, often focusing on the cultural clash between his native Japan and his adopted homeland in the United States. This retrospective of the art of Japanese-American painter Masami Teraoka features more than 30 works.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Aids Series/Geisha in Bath, 1988

Curated by Nancy R. Versaci

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

Festivals, Funerals, and New Life presents new and recent works by renowned sculptor Melvin Edwards alongside rarely exhibited historical works and pieces completed with the artist’s late wife, poet and activist Jayne Cortez. Sculptures and installations composed with industrial steel, chain, and machine parts broadly reflect Edwards’s engagement with European neocolonialism, histories of race, labor, violence and African diaspora. Bringing works from the 1970s into conversation with new and recent works, the exhibition affirms a continuity of themes, concerns, and commitments throughout Edwards’s career, spanning the Civil Rights Movement and continuing through recent and ongoing social justice movements.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Melvin Edwards, Steel Life (After Winter), 2017. Welded steel. © 2017 Melvin Edwards/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Mexico: A Collection of Photographs by Professors of the Universidad de las Americas-Puebla represented a collaboration between the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Universidad de las Americas-Puebla. Artists included in the exhibititon were Rolf Seul Weiland, Erika Wong Martinez, Juan Luis Cordero Osorio, Dornith Doherty, Jorge C. Plouganou Boiza, Angeles Gomez Gavito, and Mari Carmen Lopez Brun.

image: John O' Leary and Patrick Fontaine, The Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, 1995

The Mobile Museum of American Artifacts (MMoAA) is a touring museum of personal objects and their histories. Housed in a small vintage trailer, MMoAA travels from town to town, conducting an “archeology of the present” that uncovers objects of significant (and insignificant) connection to everyday American life. MMoAA will be making its debut visit to Providence May 11-16th. Mark your calendars and find your objects!

Hosted by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities, the MMoAA will be at the Bell Gallery on Monday, May 11 from 11-4, and at other locations in Providence throughout the week.

Over seventy prints from the first half of the twentieth century by more than sixty American artists are included in this exhibition. The exhibition was selected from the extensive holdings of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution by the Museum's Curator of Graphic Art, Joann Moser, and is being circulated in the United States by The Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, DC. In addition to prints by such renowned painters and sculptors as Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Max Weber, Adolf Gottlieb, Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, and Charles Sheeler, the show presents important work by numerous less well-known artists, among them Jolan Gross Bettelheim, Alice Trumball Mason, Benton Spruance, and Blanche Grambs.

Curated by Joann Moser
image: Jolan Gross Bettelheim, Assembly Line, ca. 1941

Curated by Debra Bricker Balken

Natural Spectacles features the work of Ashley Bickerton, Peter Campus, Rebecca Horn, Tishan Hsu, Mary Lucier, David Nyzio, Liz Phillips, Richard Rosenblum and Todd Watts. These nine artists blur the distinctions between the natural and the artificial using diverse technologies as integral elements in these new constructions. Their works are sited on the walls, on the floor, or hang from the ceiling-placement is not where their new newness lies. For all these artists, the old adage "seeing is believing" takes on new and intruiging meanings.

Curated by Deborah Bricker Balken
image: Installation View, 1996

The artists in Natured Anew—Doug Bosch, Brian Burkhardt, Bruce Chao, Barbara Takenaga, and Neeta Madahar—produce works that are inspired byor comment on the natural world. Employing painting, sculpture,photography, and video, their works range from sublimely beautifuldepictions of the cosmos to whimsical ballets of dancing seedpods andhumorous hybrid creatures that fuse nature and technology. The artistsalso share an interest in abstraction and emphasis on systems,repetition, and patterning.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Barbara Takenaga, Blue Tremor, 2003

The exhibition-organized by through the generosity of the Gabo family and the Tate Gallery Archives-includes over 100 monoprinted wood engravings created between 1950 and 1977 by the Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo (1890-1977). Born and raised in Russia, Naum Gabo became interested at an early age in aspects of both artistic and scientific modernism. Athough best known for his sculpture, Gabo also produced monoprints that reinterpreted his sculptural concepts in a new medium. In the works presented in this exhibition, known as Opus 1 through Opus 12, Gabo sought to impart the three-dimensional space of sculpture in the two-dimensional medium of prints, rather than creating prints which simply illustrate his sculpture.

image: Opus Three, 1950

Neighbors includes works by American photojournalist David H. Wells and was mounted in conjuction with "Israeli and Palestinean Identities in History, Literature and the Arts," a conference sponsored by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies. The earliest works in the exhibition, created in black and white, picture ordinary interactions between Jews and Arabs. More recent work, in color and done after the start of the peace process, explore daily life and the struggle for peace, particularly among the Palestinians. Series supported in part by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: An Arab woman and a Jewish man pass each other on a Jerusalem street, 1992

The Mexican Project at Brown University, in cooperation with the Consejo Nacional de Cultural de Venezuela and VIASA, presented the work of Venezuelan artist Nela Ochoa. The exhibition included Ochoa's video art and an installation, By Bullets.

Linda and Louis Tanner '55 met at an opening at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1966. Within a few months, they were married. Wedding gifts from artist-friends, including Claes Oldenberg, began what became a central passion of their life together: collecting art. The works exhibited here are a highlight from this gift and reflect the breadth and depth of the Tanner Collection. Grounded in modernist art from the 1970s onward, the collection includes important works by major figures such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; surprising detours, such as a Beverly Pepper “rust print;” powerful works by lesser-known modernists, such as Bram Bogart; and works by a younger generation of artists, represented here in paintings by David Ryan and Shirley Kaneda. This gift broadens the Bell Gallery collection through the addition of works by Italian Arte Povera artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lucio Fontana, and other artists not formerly represented. It also adds depth. For example, a powerful three-dimensional print from Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick Dome series (1992) complements our collection of 68 early paintings, sculptures, and prints by Stella (dating from 1958 to 1975).

Curated by John W. Coffey, Robert M. Doty, Daniel C. Dubois, Ildiko Hefferman, Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, and Nancy R. Versaci

This selection of American paintings created between 1967 and 1976 and drawn from the collection of the David Winton Bell Gallery is organized around Salute, a new acquisition by Australian American artist Denise Green.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Denise Green, Salute, 1976

Organized by the Nelson-Atkins Musueum of Art.

Featuring the work of Meridith Pingree, Jasper Rigole, Jonathan Schipper, Gregory Witt, and Zimoun, this exhibition explores the intersection between nostalgia and technology in contemporary sculpture. The five artists incorporate very simple machinery to create works that evoke different aspects of nostalgia. Rather than specific lost moments of time, they capture more abstract, visceral registers of this sentiment, whether in the form of a sense memory (of rain, or of skin crawling), a personal history (moments of key decisions), or an aesthetic associated with memory (such as the historical documentary).

Curated by Maya Allison
image: Gregory Witt, Packing Tape, 2010

The title Obsessive Patterns refers to a formal quality shared by the exhibited works—meticulously drawn or painted marks, showing obsessive attention to detail—a quality here expressed as abstract and semi-abstract patterns on paper (Tayo Heuser and Jane Masters), on rawhide (Dean Snyder), or on wood and canvas (Neal Walsh). While Heuser's and Masters's works are quiet and meditative, Snyder's and Walsh's pieces are vibrant and energetic; the former are precise and repetitive, and the latter are sketchy and unpredictable.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Jane Masters, “Untitled” from Zoomorphic Series #1, 1997

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Susannah Strong, Memory Objects, 1997

Curated by Nancy Versaci, Elaine Evans Dee, and Gail Joice

Co-organized by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Brown Arts Initiative

On Protest, Art and Activism explores differing ways artists engage the political and social issues of their time. Part 1—on view October 1–28— features works by Ja’Tovia Gary, Theaster Gates, Josephine Meckseper and Dread Scott. Part 2—on view November 2–December 19— features works by Hermine Freed, Guerrilla Girls, Suzanne Lacy, Howardena Pindell and Martha Rosler. Concurrent with Part 2, a site-specific installation of New No’s by Paul Chan and Badlands Unlimited is on view in the lobby of List Art Building.

This exhibition is and part of For Freedoms’ 50 State Initiative, a non-partisan, nationwide campaign to use art as a means of inspiring civic participation in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

Curated by: Ian Alden Russell
Image: Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21, 1980. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

In 1998 Deborah Luster began photographing inmates, who volunteeredto participate, in three Louisiana prisons—the Transylvania PrisonFarm, a minimum-security facility housing drug offenders and paroleviolator; the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, a 1,000-bedminimum- to maximum-security facility; and the Louisiana StatePenitentiary at Angola, a maximum-security facility housing more than5,000 men. She soon invited poet C.D. Wright to collaborate on theproject.Luster and Wright have worked together on a number ofprojects--sometimes initiated by the photographer, sometimes by thewriter. "I was skeptical that my art could turn itself toward thatenvironment," says Wright. "I agreed to come to Louisiana to see what Icould see, to see what she was seeing. It was a summons." Over the nextthree years, Luster and Wright visited often, taken photographs,conversing with inmates, and corresponding with them when they wereaway. The result is a powerful and haunting body of work, whichthe artists describe as an attempt to produce "an authentic document ofLouisiana's prison population through word and text, a document to wardoff forgetting, an opportunity for the inmates to present themselves asthey would be seen, bringing what they own or borrow or use; work tools,objects of their making, messages of their choosing, their bodies,themselves."

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Hustleman, 1999

Optical Noise is the latest in a long and distinguished series of exhibitions prepared by first- and second-year graduate students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. The works featured in Optical Noise are drawn almost entirely from the collections of the David Winton Bell Gallery. The collection is particularly strong in works on paper, including British and American examples made as part of the print revival of the 1960s and 1970s. A selection of these prints and two related films, which have been lent to this exhibition, are the subject of Optical Noise.

Curated by Monica Bravo, Alexandra K. Collins, Sara Hayat, Amy S. Huang,Sarah Rovang, and Rebecca A. Szantyr, with ProfessorsHerve Vanel and Catherine Zerner
image: Mel Ramos, Tobacco Rose, 1965

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Natalie Alper, Canto: For Galileo, 1994

Origins of the Italian Veduta explores the origins of topographical illustration and traces the development of the Italian veduta (city view) in the Renaissance.

Curated by Juergen Schulz, Emily Berns, Darlene Ellen Bonner, Hermona Alison Dayag, Virginia Alison Loeb, Michael Lee Olsen, and Kathe Misch Tuttman

Ornament and Architecture: Renaissance Drawings, Prints, and Books studies the development of architectural ornament and discusses its specific applications in Renaissance architecture.

Curated by Catherine Wilkinson Zerner, Janet Adams, Patricia Condon, Terry Reece Hachford, Kathleen J. Magnuson, Jane Clark Reeder, and Jenni Marie Rodda

Curated by Nancy Versaci and Judith Tolnik

Curated by Ellen McGirt and Greg Shephard

Curated by Wendy Edwards

In recent decades the pandemic of AIDS has cut a wide swath of devastation across the globe, demonstrating neither cultural preference nor political bias, yet the call to action has been relatively narrow. In conjunction with the multifaceted, international Pandemic: Facing AIDS project, Brown University offered a series of events to illustrate the struggles of people living with HIV/AIDS and how the global community is grappling with this overwhelming adversary. Brown was the first American university to exhibit Pandemic: Imaging AIDS, a 20-year retrospective look at the impact of AIDS through the work of 58 award-winning international photographers and artists from 50 countries.

image: Joao Silva, Hlabisa, South Africa, 2001

An affiliated program of the Warren and Allison Kanders Lecture Series

Co-organized by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Brown Arts Initiative

New No’s is a simple yet direct poem of defiance designed by Paul Chan and Badlands Unlimited. Published as a poster in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the poem stands as a manifesto of resistance and a protest for solidarity against political and social shifts the artists observed in the United States and beyond.

This installation is part of For Freedoms’ 50 State Initiative, a non-partisan, nationwide campaign to use art as a means of inspiring civic participation in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

Curated by: Ian Alden Russell
Image: Paul Chan with Badlands Unlimited, New No's, 2016. Courtesy the artists.

Philip II and the Escorial: Technology and the Representation of Architecture focuses on the union of science, technology, and art in the representation of architecture. The keystone of the exhibition is a set of twelve engravings published in 1589 by Juan de Herrera entitled Estampas de la Fábrica de San Lorenzo el Real de Escorial. Alongside Herrera's Estampas are rare illustrated books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings on loan from major collections in the United States and Canada.

Curated by Catherine W. Zerner, Christine Patricia Mary Brown, Stephen John Eskilson, Susan J. Garret, Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Anne Campbell Leinster, and Lisa A. Oliver
image: Battista Agnese, Oval World Map, from Manuscript Portolan Atlas of the World, 1543-1545

In conjunction with the exhibition Crafting the Medici,the Bell Gallery present photographs from the Florentine photographic studio of Fratelli Alinari.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

Pictures from the Hay celebrates the Haycentennial through a selection of visual materials—paintings, prints,drawings, photographs, artifacts and documents. The exhibition isorganized around subject areas. Some, such as the Sciences, theMilitary, and Book Arts, reflect thestrengths of the collection, whileothers, notably Rites and Ceremonies, and Entertainments and theArts—which depict social activities—are drawn from many sub-collections.The exhibition provides, of necessity, a limited glimpse of the manyimportant works of visual art and culture found within the five millionbooks, monographs, manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints, postagestamps, and sheets of music held by the John Hay Library.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin with Maya Allison, Jennifer Betts, Raymond Butti, DominqueCoulombe, Rosemary Cullen, Ann Morgan Dodge, PatriciaFigueroa, PeterHarrington, Gayle Lynch, William Monroe, Richard Noble,Holly Snyder, and Ian Straughn
image: details from Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty, Myologie complete en couleur et grandeur naturelle, 1746; Maria Sibylla Merian, Dissertatio de generatione et metamorphosibus insectorym Surinamensium, 1719; Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars memorabile provinciae Brasiliae historiam, 1592.

Pierre Huyghe is renowned for making art that challenges the conventions of the exhibition, exploring the possibilities of its dynamic experience. In the artist’s words, he constructs “time-based situations as a set of circumstances and conditions in which emergence, rhythm and variable are indeterminate and exist beyond our presence.” This exhibition is the New England premiere of his recent film Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Set in the landscape of manmade devastation that surrounds Fukushima, Japan, the film confronts us with an eerie reflection of the tenuous divisions between human and animal.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), (Film Still), 2014. Film, color, stereo, sound, 2:66. Running time: 19'07". Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, London, and Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe

Portraits & Propaganda: Faces of Rome examines various artistic, sociological, and political curents as exemplified in portraiture on coins, gems, cameos, and sculpted or painted objects of the Late Republic and the Empire through Constantine the Great.

Curated by Rolf Winkes, Laura L. Aaron, Karen Lee Bowen, Elizabeth Georgiopoulis, Elaine D. Gustafson, Julia W. Harisson, Hannelore B. Rodriguez, Diana C. Silverman, Jessica Staley, John Turner, Gregory Wallace, Allison C. Whiting, and Mark R. Wilson

French documentary photographer Gilless Peress has been photographing in Northern Ireland since 1970. More than fifty large-scale photographs chronicle the private daily rituals, political uprisings, and public activities that make up life on both sides of this complex community torn by civil war. Organized by The Art Institute of Chicago.

image: Funeral of the victims of Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972

Problemarket.com EDU + is a project created specially for Brown University by Davide Grassi and Igor Stromajer, multimedia artists based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, who produce documentary films, performances, installation art, and net projects. Initiated in 2001 as an ongoing art project, Problemarket.com functions on two levels: as a net project and as a series of live performances. Educational problems in the US are the focus of Problemarket.com EDU+.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic

Pushing Painting presents three concurrent exhibitions of new and recent work by painters living and working in New England. While differing in terms of subjects and techniques, the work of Elise Ansel, Nicole Duennebier and Duane Slick all demonstrate the vitality of contemporary painting in New England and the ever-present potential for the painted image to attract, engage and prompt reflection on how we view the world and our place within it.

Curated by: Ian Alden Russell

Image (left): Elise Ansel, Medium Study IV for Dutch Flowers, 2018
Image (middle): Nicole Duennebier, Bearded Tooth and Golden Sac, 2014
Image (right): Duane Slick, A Voice from the Prairie Grass, 2017

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.

The third in a series of installations highlighting recent additions to the photography collection, Facing the Camera surveys the uses of contemporary portraiture, both personal and political, in the works of Christopher Churchill, Kyle Meyer, Vik Muniz, Lucas Samaras, Mickalene Thomas, S.B. Walker, Jay Wolke.

image: Vik Muniz, George Stinney Jr., 2015

Curated by Nancy G. Dickinson

This selection of recent additions to the gallery’s permanent collection featured four Providence artists who show their work widely throughout the country — Yitzak Elyashiv, Irene Lawrence, Richard Fleischner and Howard Ben Tré.

image: Richard Fleischner, Melon Eaters (Balkens), 1999

Recent Acquisitions: Photography showcases recent additions to the Bell Gallery collections in the medium of photography. The show contains work by Robert Cumming, Jan Groover, Jerome Leibling, John Pfahl, and August Sanders.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

This is the second in a series of exhibitions featuring recent additions to the photography collection. Focusing on abstract images made with the "inherently" documentary medium, the exhibition will include works by Berenice Abbott, Tom Baril, Marilyn Bridges, Edward Burtynsky, Christiane Feser, Jed Fielding, Bill Jacobson, Lauren Henkin, Dorothy Norman, Gabriel Martinez, Aaron Siskind, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Image: Edward Burtynsky, Greenhouses, Almira Peninsula, Spain, 2010

Recent additions to the photography collection will be featured in exhibitions mounted in List Lobby throughout the 2018-2019 academic year. The first edition of the series looks at photographic images of architecture — as documents of buildings and as reflections of urban and rural environments. The exhibition includes works by Tom Baril, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Markus Brunetti, Walker Evans, Frank Gohlke, Todd Hido, Philip Jameson, Justin Kimball, Andrew Moore, Arthur Rothstein, and Robert von Sternberg.

image: Markus Brunetti, Conques, Abbatiale Sainte-Foy, 2012-2014

The inaugural exhibition of the Bell Gallery featured work from the collection of Albert and Vera List. After building an extensive collection of international sculpture of the fifties and sixties, the Lists began assembling an extensive collection of American art of the sixties. The exhibition presented more than twenty works from this period, including paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol as well as sculptures by Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal.

image: Kenneth Noland, Bess, 1962

Regeneration focuses on recent works by twenty-six artists who currently live in China or who received their training and started their careers in China but currently reside in the US. While the work in this survey is diverse and wide-ranging, the artists share numerous thematic and stylistic concerns. Some employ or appropriate traditional Chinese art forms in new ways. Others investigate the significant recent social and cultural transformations occurring in China. All represent the vital and rapid regeneration of contemporary life and culture in China. Regeneration was organized by the Samak Art Gallery, Bucknell University.

Curated by Dan Mills and Xiaoze Xie
image: Zhou Xiaohu, still from Beautiful Cloud, 2001

The Bell Gallery's inaugural exhibition in 1971 presented more than twenty works of American art of the sixties and early seventies from the collection of Albert and Vera List. As part of the gallery's twentieth anniversarh celebration, a second exhibition of the List collection, including nine of the works from the 1971 exhibition, will be on display from October to November. Artists include Marisol, George Segal, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and many others.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Marisol, Baby Boy, 1962-1963

What Remains includes artwork created over the past two years, during a period of transition as the artist moved beyond his well-known Elm Tree Project. The exhibition includes three new bodies of work: planks that combine elm with carbon composite and progress to high-gloss carbon surfaces that reflect and mirror light sources and viewers; ominous freestanding sculpture with thorny surfaces of resin-coated carbon fiber draped and wrapped over armatures; and wall works that cross over between drawing and sculpture.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Whiptails of Illumination, 2016

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Low Modular Block Construction, 1986

In the Asian art world, Richard Rosenblum is famous as a collector of Chinese scholar's rocks, but he was first and foremost a sculptor. He appreciated the works he collected for their beauty and their history, but he also investigated them with the sculptor's eye for form, and most of all for the processes by which form was brought into being. This exhibition explored Rosenblum's own work.

image: All the World's a Stage, 1993

Curated by Nancy Versaci

The exhibition displayed a recently acquired drawing by American artist Robert Beauchamp: Untitled, 1972.

Recent works by Hannah Barrett, Caleb Cole, Jane Maxwell, Randy Regier, Kent Regowski, and TRIIIBE

Life is a play with many roles. Whether from teddy bears, toys, or fashion icons, parents, siblings, or complete strangers, we seek out models for how to be human. This exhibition features recent work by New England artists skilled in playful mimicry, inversion, and assemblage. Representing photography, collage, sculpture, and painting, the works shown here share a sense of "serious play" with the modes, methods, materials, and processes of forming, inheriting, and expressing personal and social identities. They offer a reminder to children of all ages that identity is not fixed or inherited but made and maintained, and despite the differences and, at times, discord of our many senses of self, we share something in common in the way we enjoy the creative possibilities of becoming human.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
image: Caleb Cole, The Pink Kitchen, 2008

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Metallic Brushstroke Head, 1994

Curated by Mary Crawford Volk, Roxanne Landers Althouse, Diane Carole Bliss, Karen Towart Campbell, Gregory A. Dunn, John Kresten Jesperson, Kathleen Ann Roy, Susan Danly Walther, and Simone Alaida Zurawski

Rudolf Koppitz: Viennese "Master of the Camera" introduces a new generation to the work of this important Austrian photographer. The exhibition begins with pictorialist landscapes created during the first two decades of the century and continues with aerial views taken during the First World War, figure and nude studies-influenced by the Viennese Jugendstil-from the 1920s, and documentation of the Austrian peasantry created between 1930 and the photographer's death in 1936. The exhibition was organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin and Monica Faber
image: Bewegungsstudie (Movement Study), 1925

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.

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

Curated by Nancy Versaci

Sean Scully: Walls, Windows, Horizons presents Scully's recent paintings along his photographs, pastels, watercolors, and prints. The aim of the exhibition is two-fold:to reveal the artist's creative process rooted in the recognizable world yet expressed through abstract shapes; and to explore his interchangeable use of media and their mutual relationships. By juxtaposing Scully's painting vis-a-vis photography and other works on paper, the exhibition shows how certain motifs of concrete, visible reality— such as walls, windows, and doors are transported from photographs to paintings, as well as how certain colors and hues are transported from paintings to photographs. In addition, a selection of pastels, watercolors, and prints further emphasizes Scully's preoccupation with the same motifs, yet in different media. Although the scale and materiality of the paintings are seemingly sacrificed in the works on paper, something else comes in exchange—the softness and intimacy of paper.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: 11.11.97, 1997

A selection of works from the permanent collection mounted in conjunction with Masterpieces of Western Art and Architecture, a course offered by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Edgar Degas, Dancer Rubbing her Knee, ca. 1885

Selections from the Collection displayed work from the permanent collecton by Christian Eckart, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Ryman.

image: Christian Eckart, Odyssey (Diptych Variation) #1005, 1988

Selections from the Collection focuses on the prints and drawings that dominate the Bell Gallery collection and represent its greatest strength. The exhibition aims to provide an overview of the collection’s prints and drawings rather than to arrange them according to specific subject matter, conceptual framework, or geographic location. Its organizational principle is governed by the aesthetic and historical merit of the artworks, but also follows a chronological order, dividing the works loosely into three main sections: old master, modern, and contemporary.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin and Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view with Robert Arneson, A Hollow Gesture, 1980 and Tom Wesselman, Nude, 1965

Selections from the Permanent Collection includes landscapes and abstractions by Abbott, Siskind, Motherwell, Muller, La Farge, Callahan, Redon, van Rijn, van Ostade, von Ruisdael, Kandinsky, La Va, Perrott, Brodsky & Utkin, Piranest, and Canaletto.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Aaron Siskind, Martha's Vineyard Stone Walls 111A, 1954

The artists included in Self and Others explore their identity in relationship to others, i.e. family, friends, or society. Burke and Sage approach the self through family; Matthew focuses on ethnicity; Underhill and Burke examine gender; Tibbs compares her child and adult selves; and Lovera posits a fictionalized self as girl-adventurer, à la Pippi Longstocking.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Jesse Burke, from Masculinity, 2005-2007

Spanning a period of twenty-four years—from 1989 to 2013—the paintings, sculptures, and videos in SHE present a broad-ranging selection of contemporary depictions of women. Drawn from a private collection, the exhibition includes work by artists, such as Jenny Saville and Cindy Sherman, for whom the position of women in society is a primary concern, along with others who depict women more incidentally. Candice Breitz focuses on the portrayal of women in films, while the sometimes-controversial Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin reproduce images from popular magazines and soft-porn. The comic imagery of R. Crumb is channeled in Rebecca Warren’s crudely rendered female figures. Reworking historic painting styles, Glenn Brown and George Condo create outrageous and gloriously painted women. The idiosyncratic work of Yayoi Kusama is represented by an unusual painted self-portrait, while Chris Ofili's Orgena depicts an iconic African beauty (The title is a reversal of “a negro”). Finally, for Jeff Koons images of women are purely incidental—part and parcel of his Pop renderings. Reflecting the taste of the anonymous collector, the works in SHE combine to present a select overview of art and its approaches to women at the turn of the century.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: George Condo, The Banker's Wife, 2011

Silver: New Forms and Expressions III displayed work from the Third Annual Fortunoff Silver Competition, sponsored by The Providence Jewelry Museum.

Simen Johan has crafted a series of uncanny photographs of animals that delight and perplex. Striving to “confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie,” Johan mixes sweet images appropriate for children’s literature with dark and mysterious scenes that might illustrate our primordial beginnings or apocalyptic ends. Smiling owls and weeping foxes mimic human emotions. Flamingos perform ballet. Reindeer lay frozen in ice, and moose battle each other amidst a flock of parakeets.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Simen Johan, Untitled, 2006

The David Winton Bell Gallery presented Six Painters, an exhibition drawn from the membership of the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Stylistically diverse, the exhibition included abstractions, expressionistic landscapes, urban views that border on the surreal, and psychologically charged dreamscapes rendered in a cartoon style.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Hyun H. Chang, Angel Watching the Moon Rising, 1997

According to Webster, sleight of hand refers to a "skill with the hands so as to confuse those watching, as in doing magic tricks . . . ." The artists Holly Laws and Larimer Richards rely on such a device of "trickery or magic" to point to the deceptive and illusionary aspects of art that are never fully graspable, but rather implied. Holly Laws's installation LIMN is comprised of small, disembodied wooden legs decked out in elaborately crafted shoes that are at once amusing and disconcerting. Larimer Richards creates installations (videos projected onto objects and sculpture) which fool the eye and entertain the spirit.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Larimer Richards, Night Lite, 1997

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s socially-engaged projects explore contemporary relationships between human and non-human animals in the contexts of history, culture and the environment. Based on their work alongside avian researchers at Jacob’s Point, RI, The Only Show in Town will comprise artworks made in response to the plight of the saltmarsh sparrow, resident in the world only along a narrow and depleted margin of the east coast of North America and marked for extinction by the year 2050. The exhibition is supported, in part, by the Brown Arts Initiative.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image:Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Escape/Release #4, 2019

Curated by Hugh Townley

For over twenty years, Sophie Calle has been fascinated with blurring the boundaries of public and private in everyday life. Using photography and text as her medium and strangers as her subjects, Calle approaches her work much like a detective. She rises issues on intimacy and identity, playing with the experience of watching and being watched, often pushing the limits of what is generally respected as private.

Spectacular Vernacular features traditional desert architecture from Southwest Asia and sculptures and textiles from Brown's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.

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.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin

The exhibition presents recent works by Stephan Balkenhol: free-standing sculptures and reliefs in wood, as well as prints on wooden panels that concentrate on the human figure, both nude and clothed. The majority of the works were produced in 2000 especially for this traveling exhibition, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in collaboration with the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, Missouri.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
Image: installation view at Bell Gallery with Three Men on a Sculpted Pedestal in foreground

In the largest faculty exhibition ever presented at the David Winton Bell Gallery, sixteen artists from the Department of Visual Art and The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Modern Culture and Media at Brown University will show work in a broad range of media, from painting, sculpture, and graphics to mixed media and video. Members of the full time faculty, visiting faculty, faculty emeriti, and adjunct lectureres will be included in the show, and many of the works will be created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition features the work of Leslie Bostrom, Tony Cokes, Elizabeth Dworkin, Wendy V. Edwards, Walter Feldman, Richard Fishman, Annie Goldson, Annette Lemieux, Marlene Malik, Roger Mayer, Jerry Mischak, Anne Morgan Spalter, Donald K. Thornton, Leslie Thornton, Hugh Townley, and Ellen Zweig.

image: Leslie Thornton, Still from the video series Peggy and Fred in Hell

Still Time is a series of 57 photographs representing years of consistent visual exploration. It is a personal statement which illuminates the roots of Mann's widely acclaimed, distinctive visual language.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Night-Blooming Cereus, 1988

An exhibition of artwork by Brown students presented by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art.

An exhibition of artwork by Brown students presented by the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art.

An exhibition of artwork by Brown students presented by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art.

The 22nd annual Student Exhibition provides the public with an opportunity to explore the formal and conceptual concerns that engage the student artists at Brown. This year's jurors are Laurie Riccadonna and Julian LaVerdiere. The show includes works by: Megumi Aihara, Jonathan Allmaier, Thomas Beresford, Sarah Bernard, Amy Bilderbeck, Kern Bruce, Zachary David Culbreth, Caryn Davidson, Mark Domino, Alissa Faden, Lucas Foglia, Edrex Fontanilla, Brandon Gross, Christopher Gudas, Gudrun Gunther, Nicole Herschenhous, Loren Holland, Sibel Horada, Clare Johnson, Darren Jorgensen, A-mi Kim, Max Kuller, Joanne Leavy, Matt Lewkowicz, Polina Malikin, Philip Maysles, Sarah O'Dea, Andrea Parada, Nathaniel Pollard, Ann Rundquist, John J. Speicher, Vivian Tang, Jenna Wainwright, Maria Walker, and John Wiener.

image: Loren Holland, Peep-hole, 2001

The 23nd annual Student Exhibition is presented by the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art. The jurors for this year's show are Jane Masters and Raphael Lyon. Both artists live in Providence. Artists included in the exhibition are Jenny Asarnow, Claire Baker, Bennett Barbakow, Solon Barocas, Rebecca Noelle Bates, Ryan Barger, Leah Beeferman, Nicholas Beem, Estelle Bossy, Rebecca Brown, Jessie Cohan, Ilana Cohen, Louise Despont, Breanne Duffy, Annie Frazier, Deborah Grossberg, Eva Happel, Michelle Higa, Arthur Hur, Iris Jaffe, Mairin Jerome, Jamie Kaufmann, Sarah Kessler, Annie Kirby, Anna Knoell, Amy Komarnicki, Max Kuller, Kevin Kunstadt, Yew Leong Lee, Katherine Mann, Colleen McHugh, David Morehouse, Lisa Morrow, Amanda Norman, Lauren Oakes, Manu Sawker, Ellen Schneiderman, Tal Schori, Jessica Schwartzberg, Will Shapiro, Chris Smith, Chutrudee Joy Somberg, John Jasper Speicher, Daniella Spinat, Beath Stepien-Liv, Eva Struble, Arthi Sundaresh, Janine Szczepanski, Vivian Tang, Leksi Weldon-Linne, Joseph Winter, Helena Wurzel.

image: installation view with, from left back: Eva Struble, Untitled; Iris Jaffe, Self-portrait on Purim; and Estelle Bossy, Max Huller, and Louise Despont, Edible Environment.

The 24th annual Student Exhibition is presented by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art.The jurors for this year's show are Elinor Hollinshead, a painter and an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Matthew Cottam, who teaches at RISD and the Fraunhofer Center for Research, and multimedia artist Susannah Strong. Artists included in the exhibition are Claire Baker, Leah Beeferman, Beth Brandon, Ian Budish. Amanda Cheung, Paul Dumaine, Lucas Foglia, Aleksander Garin, Max Gitlen, Michelle Higa, Iris Jaffe, Clare Johnson, Selena Juneau-Vogel, Jamie Kaufman, Anna Knoell, Kevin Kunstadt, Johnny Lin, Jacquelyn Mahendra, Katherine Mann, Laini Nemett, Amanda Norman, Lauren Oakes, Dania Peterson, Risa Puno, Zeynep Saygin, Ellen Schneiderman, Chris Smith. Corey Solinger. Sheena Sood, Arthi Sundaresh, Andrew Thorpe, Laura Vitale, Leksi Weldon-Linne, Rebecca Wiener, Jennifer Wong, Tatyana Yanishevsky, Ali Zarrabi.

image: installation view with Tatyana Yanishevsky, Passionflower, 2004

Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery and Department of Visual Art present the 25th annual Student Exhibition. The jurors for this year's exhibition are Camille Rendal and Jeffrey Silverthorne. Both are visiting assistant professors in visual arts at Roger Williams University. Artists included in the exhibition are Claire Baker, Madeleine Bailey, Amy Beecher, Becky Brown, Jessie Chaney, Zoë Chao, Ellen Chu, Sophie Cook, Katelin Crook, Gracie DeVito , Breanne Duffy, Paul Dumaine, James Dunber, Valery Estabrook, Lucas Foglia, Caroline Gray, Mathieu Greenfield, Jonathan Herman, Jacquelyn Mahendra, Katherine Mann, Anne McClain, Nicholas Monu, Stephen Neidich, Emily Nemens, Audrey Sato, Ellen Schneiderman, Ken Seligson, Jessica Simmons, Corey Solinger, Arthi Sundaresh, Komal Talati, Quyen Truong, Laura Wagner, Leslie Wei, Tatyana Yanishevsky, Scott Yi, Michael Zaitzeff, and Ali Zarrabi.

image: Lucas Foglia, Somerset Community Garden, 2004

Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery and Department of Visual Art will present the 26th annual Student Exhibition. The jurors are Maureen O'Brien, Curator of Painting and Sculpture, at the RISD Museum, and Ron L. Hutt, Assistant Professor of Art, Department of Art and Art History, University of Rhode Island.The exhibition includes work by Madeleine Bailey, Sophie Barbasch, Amy Boyle, Galen Broderick, Zachary Clark, Andrew Dewitt, Noel Needison Fetting-Smith, Jay Gidwitz, Lauren Gidwitz, Shanay Jhaveri, Lauren Khoo, Julie Kumar, Brian James Lee, Nicholas Monu, Laini Nemett, Rafeal Man Hin Ng, Sean P. Tiner, Rebecca Sauer, Janelle Sing, David Watson Sobel, Elizabeth Stamp, Robin Steele, Hana van der Steur, John Szymunski, and Komal Talati.

image: Janelle Sing, Self-portrait

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art at Brown University present Student Exhibition 2007, the 27th annual student exhibition. This year’s jurors are Magaly Ponce, a Chilean-born video and installation artist, and Munir D. Mohamed, a painter originally from Kumasi, Ghana. Artists included in the exhibition are: Olutade Abidoye, Nora Blackall, Galen Broderick, Jessie Chaney, Simon Charlow, Jesse Cohn, Tryn Collins, Kriya Gishen, Oliver Daly, Noel Madison Fetting-Smith, Annie Fish, Lauren Fisher, Tihtina Zenebe Gebre, Sarah Goldstein, Lindsay Harrison, Melissa Henry, Sarah Hotchkiss, Shanay Jhaveri, Lily Kerrigan, Julie Kumar, Sarah Labrie, Gillian Lang, Geddes Levenson, David Lloyd, Yifan Luo, Zachary Miller, Rebecca Nelson, Tasha Ong, Pook Panyarachun, Miranda Elliott Rader, Emily Roberts, Talia Rozensher, Claire Russo, Max Schoening, Jessica Simmons, David Watson Sobel, Sung-A Jang, Lydia Stein, John Szymanski, Jessica Taylor, Meris Tombari, Mark Tumiski, Sushant Wagley, K. Adam White, and Sabine Zimmer.

image: Pook Panyarachun, Untitled, 2007

The 28th annual juried Student Exhibition is sponsored by the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art. Murray McMillan and Anne Tait served as jurors. Both artists teach at Roger Williams University in Bristol. The exhibition is open to all Brown students. It provides students with the valuable experience of showing their work within a professional setting, while at the same time providing the Brown and Providence communities an opportunity to view works by talented young artists. Artists in this year’s exhibition are Dara Bayer, Megan Billman, Anne Blazejack, Cody L. Campanie, Cheih Chin Chiang, Jesse Cohn, Thomas Dahlberg, Sara D’Apolito Dworkin, Lauren Engel, Sarah Faux, Hilary Fischer-Groban, Elizabeth Fisher, Jay Gidwitz, Brooke Hair, Melissa Henry, Henry G. Lee, Katrina Lencek-Inagaki, David Lloyd, Kelly Ma, Alice Malone, Mary MacGill, Sarah Meiklejohn, Rachel Moranis, Sophia Narrett, Stephen Neidich, Rebecca Nelson, Alice Nystrom, Erica Palmiter, Kim Perley, Alex Rosenbaum, Victoria Roth, Malika Rubin-Davis, David Watson Sobel, Lydia Stein, John Szymanski, Jessica Taylor, Miho Tomimasu, Mark Tumiski, Paul Wallace, Christina Wang, Aaron Weinstein, and Hannah Wohl.

image: Megan Billman, Miss Narrative 3, 2007

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

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department ofVisual 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

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of 38 young artists for the 31st annual Student Exhibition. This year the guest jurors were Lucky Leoneand Olive Ahyens. Artists selected for the exhibition are Gabriela Baiter, Arlando Battle, Genevieve Busby, Nicholas Carter,Alexander Currimjee, Leilani Diaz, Christina Fleischer, Diana Friedman, Anna Gaissert, Robert Gordon-Fogelson, Sarah Grimm, Aviva Grossman,John Haenle, David Hernandez, Ryan Hoskins, Erika Jung, Lauren Kent, Olivia Kirby, Amanda Lee, Jung Min Lee, Alejandra Lindstrom Peralta, Maria Macrina, Isabel Mattia, Anne Oram, Brice Peterson, Michael Price, Harry Reis, Nina Ruelle, Emily Sanford, Bridget Sauer, Jill Silverberg,Todd Stong, Alex Toyoshima, Randall Trang, Lamia Veerasamy, Kelly Winter, June Yoon, and Scotty Zane Carroll.

image: Robert Gordon-Fogelson, Providence, 2010

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of talented Brown artists in the 32nd annual Student Exhibition. The exhibition is open to all Brown University students. Jurors for this year's exhibition are Ellen Driscoll, Head of Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design; and Deborah Bright, Acting Dean of Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design.

image: Anne Muselmann, File Cabinet, 2011

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of thirty-two talented student artists in Brown’s 33^rd annual Student Exhibition. The juried exhibition is open to all Brown students. The jurors for this year's exhibition are Robert P. Stack and Vanphouthon Souvannasane of Yellow Peril Gallery.

image: Anna Muselmann, Yellow Finch, 2012

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of talented student artists in Brown's 34th annual Student Exhibition. Exhibition jurors are Providence artist Kelli Rae Adams and painter Susan Lichtman, Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University and a Brown alum.

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of forty-four artists in Brown’s 35^th annual Student Exhibition,on view at the Bell Gallery from Saturday, April 11 to Sunday, April26, 2015. An opening reception will be held Saturday, April 11, from7:00pm until 9:00pm. There will be two performances during thereception. The exhibition and opening reception are free and open to thepublic.

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of thirty student artists in Brown’s 36th annual Student Exhibition, on view at the Bell Gallery from Wednesday, April 13 to Sunday, April 24, 2016. A reception will be held Friday, April 22, from 7:00pm until 9:00pm. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of student artists in Brown’s 37th annual Student Exhibition.

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the work of student artists in Brown University's 38th annual Student Exhibition.

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's Collection, the objects on display echo an amalgam of the styles and visual forms entwined in the work of LeWitt and his peers.

Survival of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Medieval Art investigates the Warburgian tradition of the continuation of mythological imagery long past the decline of the Roman empire. The exhibition examines the persistence of classical images in many media during the Middle Ages, from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries.

Curated by Sheila Bonde, Susan Heuck Allen, Garrett Bliss, Georgina E. Borromeo, Elisa Buono, Laura M. Hendrickson, Kerry B. Herman, Annemarie Jordan, Kelly Kamborian, and Afuri Soeda

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Song T'ae-hoe, Tiger in Bamboo

Curated by Nancy R. Versaci

The Boat of My Life is a sculptural installation by Russian-born artist Ilya Kabakov. It features a 58-foot-long wooden boat with twenty-five boxes on its deck. Filled with all types of personal objects, these boxes allude to episodes from the artist’s life in Russia prior to his move to Western Europe in the late 1980s and later to the United States in the early 1990s.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: The Boat of My Life

The exhibition provided visual and textual evidence of three important classification systems for collecting prints from the 16th, 17th, and early 19th centuries.

image: Ferdinand Bol, Saint Jerome in the Cave, 1644

Although they are not located in a single museum facility, the collections of Brown University are extraordinarily diverse and of very high quality. As part of its twentieth anniversary celebration, the David Winton Bell Gallery will serve as the setting for an exhibition of some of the University's finest holdings. Works will range from paintings, sculpture, prints, books, and drawings to coins, ethnographic arts, and decorative arts.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Henri Matisse, Portrait of a Young Man

Curated by Roger Mayer

This interpretive show, the twenty-fifth annual Graduate Student exhibition, presents in its entirety the collection of Chinese objects acquired by the Museum of Art through the bequest of collector John M. Crawford, Jr. Particulary rich in decorative arts of the late imperial period, the collection includes Buddhist sculptures, jade mountains, and carved figures in jade and semi-precious stones, as well as porcelains and scholar's implements of imperial manufacture.

Curated by Maggie Bickford, Mark A. Abdoo, Barbara Apelian Beall, Marcia Gagliardi Brennan, Shelley Drake Hawks, Estelle O'Neill, Traci L. Paul, and Sarah Rehm Roberts
image: Covered Ewer, Qing dynasty, late 19th century

The Fabric of Light features work by local artists Nina Cinelli, Cristin Searles, Esther Solondz and Cynthia Treen. Each of the artists uses fabric and light as sculptural materials to dramatize their interrelationship.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: installation view with work by Cynthia Treen in foreground and Cristin Searles on wall

Featuring works by Chicago photographer Melissa Ann Pinney, The Girls of Summer evokes the sights and sounds of that season of leisure—our return to the out-of-doors after the confines of winter and school. As she has since the late 1980s, Pinney focuses on “feminine identity . . . exploring the persistence of the child in the woman and the early cultivation of the woman in the child.” She draws our attention to the joys of tree climbing and the exuberance of a soccer match, and to quieter moments of friendship or contemplation.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Melissa Ann Pinney, Lake Michigan, August, 2009/2011

Curated by Richard Fleischner

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: William Traylor, WPA Poster, 1939-42

Curated by David Lattimore, David Bright, William J. Chapman, Stacy Cheriff, Cindy Cyker, Suzanne Forte, Jane C. Long, Ruby Ming, Liane Pei, and Roberta Reeder

The exhibition accompanied a symposium on contemporary film and photography entitled "Mexico: The Artist is a Woman."

image: Caricia (Caress), 1989

The Martial Face: The Military Portrait in Britain, 1760-1900 focuses on the artistic ramifications ofthe changing attitudes in British society towards the military from 1760 to 1900 as expressed through portraiture. Drawing primarily upon the resourches of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University, the exhibition studies the art historical, historical, and sociological significance of the changing face of British military portraiture in portrait engravings, paintings, and photographs.

Curated by Jay A. Clarke, Tracie E. Constantino, B. Dawn Dunley, Amanda M. Eggers, Carter E. Foster, Peter Harrington, Teresa R. Knox, Elizabeth Perry, Courtland David Roach, Sandra R. Rothenberg
image: Anthony Cardon after P.J. de Loutherbourg, Soldiers, Sailors, and Mariners decorating an Egyptian Monument with portraits of the officers on the staff of Sir Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria, 1801, 1806

Paintings by Robert DeNiro, Louis Finkelstein, Ira Joel Haber, Ian Hornak, Sarah Supplee, and James Weeks.

In conjunction with Brown University's celebration of the Columbus Quincentenary, the Gallery presents a selection of works on paper by a broad range of twentieth-century Latin American artists. Representing traditions as diverse as the European modernism reflected in the art of Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Merida and Roberto Matta Echauuren, the indigenous "folk" imagery of Angel Bracho and the very personal Pop Art of the Venezuelan-born Marisol, the works in the exhibition express some of the richness and vitality found in the graphic arts of the "New World."

image: Angel Bracho, Peasants Grinding Grain

Between 1991 and 1998 Lucinda Devlin photographed in penitentiaries intwenty states, with the permission and cooperation of the local authorities. She called the resulting series The Omega Suites, alluding to the final letter of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor for the finality of execution. The series includes thirty chilling color photographs of execution chambers and associated spaces, such as holding cells and viewing rooms. With over 3000 inmates on death row and 70 percent of US citizens supporting the death penalty, The Omega Suites brings focus to one of the great ethical questions facing contemporary Americans, about which public opinion continues to be passionate.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Executioner's Room, Greenhaven Correctional Facility, 1991

The Photographic Portfolio, an exhibition drawn largely from the Gallery's own holdings, explores the varied images and themes in photographic albums and portfolios from the late nineteenth century to the present. The exhibition is presented in honor of the 150th anniversary of the development of photography. Some of the diverse works presented include: Eadweard Muybridge's collotypes for Animal Locomotion; Edward Sheriff Curtis' monumental series of photogravures for his twenty-one volume study, The North American Indian; Eliot Porter's China portfolio; Andreas Feininger's Vintage New York; Berenice Abbott's Science Pictures; Dr. Harold Edgerton's bold motion studies; Larry Clark's Tulsa portfolio; Danny Lyon' Conversations with the Dead; urban scenes by Garry Winogrand and Elliot Erwitt; and photogravures taken from Aaron Siskind's series "Homage to Franz Kline."

image: Larry Clark, Untitled (Pregnant woman shooting up), 1980

Surveys the portrait bust in sculpture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Curated by Carl Goldstein, Christina Cameron, David Chase, Peter Fusco, Myra F. Harrison, Ann E. Horlacher, Walter A. Liedtke, and Alice H. Reid

Each of the artists in The Rome Project was given the opportunity to spend several months in a studio facility in Rome. The works which resulted from this "sabbatical" and how each artist responded to this extraordinary city form the basis of this show. Among the diverse objects included are photographs bby and of Cindy Sherman "in costume," wonderfully outrageous tapestries by Meyer Vaisman, and acrylic and silkscreen paintings by Richard Prince.

Curated by Diana L. Johnson
image: Meyer Vaisman, Giorgio, 1990

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

Aleksandr Brodsky and Ilya Utkin first achieved international recognition in the mid-1970s as members of a loosely organized group called “paper architects.” Graduating from Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Architecture in1978, the pair found themselves at odds with Breshnev’s doctrine of architectural utilitarianism. They found an outlet for their interests, which tended toward an eclectic assortment of styles and period, in international design competitions organized by architectural magazines in Japan, England, the United States, and other countries. The competitions stressed theory over functions, addressing programs like “A Glass Monument to the Year 2001” and “The Intelligent Market.”
The exhibition is drawn from the portfolio Projects 1981–1990, a gift of the Friends of List Art Center in memory of Patricia M. Morrissey.

image: Diomede II, 1989-90

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Villa Claustrophobia, 1985/90

Don’t Get Out Much includes a series of large-scale photographic collages and a 490 sq. ft. mural that covers the entire surface of the windows in the List Art Center entrance. The work of assistant professor Theresa Ganz, the series continues the artist’s exploration of nature. Having grown up in New York City, Ganz points out that her interest in nature is more aesthetic than actual, derived from the study of German Romantic painting and literature. The collages in the exhibition combine photographs of glacial rocks and tidal pools with loose washes of watercolor that softening the hard edges of the real. The window mural extends the watercolor onto the windows, thereby washing the gallery with soft colors and uniting the viewer and the work within a shared environment.

curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Theresa Ganz, Tidal Pool III, 2012

Thomas Alexander Tefft: American Architecture in Transition, 1845-1860 explores major stylistic and cultural currents in mid-nineteenth century American architecture, using as a touchstone Thomas Tefft, one of the period's most talented and prolific American architects.

Curated by Kathleen Curran, Jenny Anger, Arabella Berkenbilt, David A. Brenneman, Jutta-Annette Brunn, Leslie DeAngela Dees, Katherine M. Long, and David C. Ogawa

Through Mexican Eyes presented the work of four women photographers: Flor Garduno, Graciela Iturbide, Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, and Mariana Yampolsky. These four internationally recognized Mexican photographers are known for their eloquent images which document the rituals, poetry, and magical qualities of traditional Mexican culture. The dislocations in the lives of individuals in the small towns and villages of Mexico as they come in contact with an increasingly insistent "world culture" also serve as appropriate subject matter for these four artists.

image: Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, Mariposa (Butterfly), 1984

Curated by Kermit Champa, Ellen Lawrence, Alexandra Murphy, Ronald Onorato, Marcia Rickard, Nancy Rosen, Simone Z. Urawski, Miguel Justiniano, and David Cass

In the artist’s words, Toby Sisson’s artworks explore “the breadth of metaphoric meaning that can be derived from non-objective abstraction, especially psychological and social content.” Concerned with issues of race, reflecting her biracial experience, Sisson here interrogates the word “American” or “Nacirema” referencing Nacirema Clubs (social clubs for African Americans) that were popular in the Midwest during her youth.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Toby Sisson, detail of Deconstructed American, 2019

The Bell Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper by Chicago-based artist Tony Fitzpatrick. In conjunction with the exhibition a performance of Fitzpatrick's "Stations Lost" (2010) will be staged at the Granoff Center for Creative Arts on October 9th, 2015.

Curated by Alexis Lowry Murray
Image: Tony Fitzpatrick, Blackburnian Wobblers, 2015
 

Toward uncertainty features two masters of modern Italian art, Alighiero e Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto, along with five younger Italian artists—Elisabetta Di Maggio, Lara Favaretto, Ottonella Mocellin, Adrian Paci and Sabrina Torelli, all finalists for the Querini-FURLA prize.

Curated by Chiara Bertola and Vesela Sretenovic
image: Lara Favaretto, Il mondo alla rovescia (The topsy-turvy world), 2001

Tradition, Trauma, Transformation: Representations of Women features the work of three leading contemporary artists: Nalini Malani,Nilima Sheikh and Chitra Ganesh. Indian and Indian-American, their worksare influenced by political, religious, and cultural situations, aswell as personal relationships, involving sexuality and the position ofwomen.

Curated by Mallica Kumbera Landrus and Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Chitra Ganesh, Melancolia: The Think of Time, 2011

An in-depth discussion of the Court Style, circa 1300, examining stylistic hegemony in European art across all media, including architecture, sculpture, painting and textiles.

Curated by Dorothy Gillerman, Margaret Patricia Haneberg, Joan Adrian Holladay, George P. Landow, Heather Bruce Pattison, Diane Aspacia Rallis, Ann Hartley Sievers, Lisa Dennison Tabak, Susan Leibacher Ward, and Joanna E. Ziegler

Hidden beneath Providence's rich architectural heritage lies another story—that of its unbuilt architecture: of urban visions before their time, ambitious designs that were not needed, and detailed projects that were abolished at the last minute. Unbuilt Providence tells that story in drawings and models of buildings and urban designs for the city that were considered during the last 150 years but never executed.These rarely seen works—often of considerable artistic merit—document great ambitions, personal flights of fancy and sweeping urban visions.

Curated by Dietrich Neumann and Jo-Ann Conklin
image: I.M. Pei, proposal for Brown University Geo Math Building, 1969

Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, an interactive exhibit based on the oral histories of slaves collected by the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s, was presented in the lobby of the Salomon Center for Teaching. The exhibit, which complements the HBO film of the same title, was organized by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center of Cincinnati. It was brought to Brown in conjunction with the May 24 Commencement Forum by alumnus Spencer Crew, executive director of the Center.

image: Still from film "Unchained Memories," directed by Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon, 2003

Urban Landscapes…emancipation and nostalgia feature works by British artist Catherine Yass, New York artist Sze Tsung Leong, and German artist Sabrine Hornig. The underlying theme of the exhibition is the transformative character of urban landscapes, involving both physical destruction and construction, and a feeling of emancipation and nostalgia.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Catherine Yass, still from Lock 2006

New York sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard created a site work for the lobby of the List Art Center at Brown University. Working with students at the University to prepare the surface and install the large-scale sculpture made of Western red cedar, the artist was in residence during the first week of March. The artist is best known for her rugged constructions in wood, which suggest monumentality regardless of their actual scale.

image: Installation View, 1991

The exhibition includes over seventy constructions, collages, and floor pieces, with an emphasis on the most recent work of this master of visual myth making. Boghosian uses found objects, from old tools to mannikins' heads, to create his "retellings" of favorite themes, prominent among them the classic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

image: February, 1991

The exhibition featured the work of Victoria Gerwirz and Heidi Sherman. Both photographers use platinum and palladium tones, which give their works great richness. Both also make small format prints to establish a direct relationship with viewers. Their imagery and choice of medium place them within a pictorialist tradition that had its antecedents in a painterly movement at the end of the last century.

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

An accomplished hyper-realistic draftsman in many mediums, San Antonio-based artist Vincent Valdez composes portraits and scenes that appear to promise historical representation, factual narrative, and, perhaps, truth. His works are, however, fantasies whose misleadingly realistic depiction belie committed and sincere critiques of masculinity, gender roles, and social and political orders. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, Valdez has exhibited extensively in Texas, the Midwest, the Southwest, and Los Angeles. This exhibition marks his solo debut on the East Coast.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Vincent Valdez, Untitled from The Strangest Fruit, 2013

image: Bill Traylor, Black House Cat, 1932-42

VoiceOver explores the narrative tradition in sculpture through the work of three New England artists. The title points to the importance of material choices in the deliverance of sculptural narrative; these choices act as a voice-over leading the viewer through the work.

Curated by Dean Snyder
image: Amy Podmore, Measures Rest, 2009
 

The Ashes Series marks a shift of the platform of Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal. Known for provocative, performative, and innovative artwork often using technology and new media, Bilal has cultivated an aesthetic of conflict, tension, and direct confrontation with the social, political, and ethical dynamics of the modern world. In contrast, the photographs in The Ashes Series are still - almost serene. The series consists of ten photographs of models constructed by the artist based on mass-syndicated images of the destruction of Iraq in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In all the photographs, he has removed the human figures that were present in the original images, replacing them with 21 grams of human ashes distributed throughout the ten models. Referencing the mythical weight of the human soul, these 21 grams insert a human aura into the photographs, troubling the serenity of the scenes - the afterimage of conflict. The proverbial dust, captured suspended in mid-air by the camera, will never settle.

Curated by Ian Alden Russell
Image: Wafaa Bilal, Chair, 2003-2012

We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask is a project by Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born artist who lives and works in New York.Focusing on the history of car bombings in the Lebanese wars, the project includes a 17-minutes long video and a series of 43 photographs. The allusive title, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, refers to the impossibility of prognosis, less in terms of weather conditions, and more in terms of the future historical, geopolitical, and cultural conditions.
Raad has created a work specifically for the List Art Center lobby. The large four-part mural depicts the post 9/11 sociopolitical landscape. The background of each wall of the lobby is painted in a different shade of blue, referencing the sky over New York on September 11, 2001. The rough, sketchy drawings are digitally manipulated courtroom drawings that the artist compiled for a number of years after 9/11, left intentionally unfinished to remain ambiguous in origin and reference.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Proposal for wall drawing

Walter Feldman’s affiliation with Brown University began in 1953, when he taught his first class in visual design, extended through his fifty-four year teaching career, and continues today in a legacy of sustained artistic and educational endeavors. This memorial exhibition celebrates Feldman's life through his arts, including a retrospective selection of paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, and artists’ books.

Curated by: Jo-Ann Conklin
Image: Walter Feldman, Self Portrait, 1947-1949

The David Winton Bell Gallery will celebrate the artistic and educational accomplishments of one of Brown’s most senior faculty members in its exhibition, Walter Feldman: The Work of Five Decades. The exhibition spans Feldman’s career, beginning with a macabre image of a skeleton-faced soldier—done in 1946 shortly after he returned from his service in World War II—and continuing through his most recent artist’s book, The Ballad of Rodger Young, completed in 2003. Between the two, Feldman has created works in a wide range of materials: paintings in egg tempera, gouache, oil and acrylic; pen and ink drawings; mosaics and stained glass; silk screens, woodcuts, etchings and engravings; and mixed media sculpture, collage and hand-set letterpress books.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Untitled (soldier), 1946

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Dorothy Hamill

Curated by Diana L. Johnson, Catherine Zerner, Laurel M. Baker, Cynthia L. Dillman, Douglas J. Fisher, Nancy Litsrdopoulou, Lewis I. Sharp, Eileen L. Vote, and Adriana Zavela
image: Accident, Killed in a Car Crash, n.d.

Women's Work: Selections from the Collection features the work of Lee Bontecou, Jennifer Bartlett, Hannah Wilke, Maggie Poor, Leslie Dill, Joan Snyder, and Miriam Schapiro.

Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Jennifer Bartlett, Day and Night, 1978

The David Winton Bell Gallery, meme@Brown, and the Program in Literary Arts, Brown University, presented the exhibition Works from the Cave II, in Brown University's virtual reality "Cave," located in the Center for Computation and Visualization, 180 George St. Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot cube with high-resolution stereo graphics projected onto three walls and the floor to create immersive virtual reality. Viewers wander through real or imagined three dimensional spaces, experience a new type of reading where text no longer needs to appear on a surface, and see new types of performance. Works in the 2005 exhibition were created by graduate and undergraduate students from Brown and RISD.

image: Joseph Grimm, Nicholas Musurca and Patrizia Pilosi, Cave Music, 2005

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