"These 'Things' I Call Art" showcases Eskenazi alumnus and faculty Don Gene Bell
By:Yaël Ksander
Monday, November 06, 2023
Don Gene Bell, self-portrait, oil on canvas. Indiana University Campus Art Collection.
University Collections at McCalla School launches a retrospective exhibition of the innovative and heterogeneous oeuvre of Eskenazi alumnus (B.A. '61, M.F.A. '65) and former faculty member Don Gene Bell with a reception Thursday, November 9, from 5 to 7 pm. "These 'Things' I Call Art" showcases work across genres and media made by the widely exhibited, published, and collected Indiana-born artist with deep ties to the Eskenazi School.
Curated by Kathryn Chattin, director of campus art & associate director of University Collections, and engagement coordinator Alisha Beard, the posthumous show is drawn from a large gift made to the university in 2022 by Bell’s surviving partner, Bob Varga. The gift comprises over 500 items, including pieces of Bell's own artwork, his archives, and art made by others. From 1997 until Bell’s passing in September 2020, the couple lived and operated an art studio in Tucson, Arizona.
Don Gene Bell, Tuscon Landscape, watercolor on paper. IU Campus Art Collection.
Born in Albion, Indiana in 1935, Bell grew up in rural Indiana and Ohio, where his parents worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. One wall of the exhibition is hung with paintings and drawings of farm life based directly on family photos; other works pay particular attention to machines and motion -- a result, Beard speculates, of Bell’s early exposure to farm machinery and airplanes.
Bell attended a two-year program at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before pursuing his visual arts education at Indiana University, where he studied design with George Sadek, among others. As a student and afterwards, Bell served IU in a variety of capacities. As an undergraduate, he was employed by the university television station that would become WTIU, subsequently working as curator of exhibits at the university’s new anthropology and history museum (now the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). Upon earning his M.F.A., Bell became an assistant professor in IU’s graphic, exhibition, and interior design program, where he taught from 1965-68.
While serving as a professor and in the administration of the department of art and art history at SUNY-Binghamton for three decades, Bell developed a body of work encompassing plein-air landscape, figure painting, erotica, commercial design, storybook illustrations, and minimalist, three-dimensional canvases. His work belongs to the collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the University Art Gallery at SUNY-Binghamton, Security Mutual Insurance Co, the Erie Museum of Art, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, among other institutions.
Don G. Bell, Stretched Canvas Series, 2012, canvas, metal. IU Campus Art Collection.
“It became very evident to us that when it came to his life and his art, it was the process that was the most important to him above everything,” said Beard. The copious notes Bell kept map the paths of his inquiry, sources of inspiration, processes, measurements, and philosophy. “You may see the object and name it in the ambiguity of shape, value, and form,” Bell wrote in one notebook on display in the gallery. “May that secret self be your pleasure and private joy, but the piece is forever free!”
The idea that a work of art eludes a fixed identity but can yield secret meaning or “private joy” to each viewer culminates in the works Bell considered to be his most realized: raw canvases shaped or sculpted over armatures, sometimes intersected by wooden or metal seams or spines. Bearing such titles as “Point Counterpoint” and “Big River,” the minimalist works fragment the traditionally seamless picture plane into compartments onto which light falls disparately and evolves according to ambient illumination. As such, a shaped canvas hung in one room at one time of day might look entirely different in another.
Don G. Bell, Shaped Canvas. IU Campus Art Collection
Beard and Chattin trace the self-imposed restriction of focus of Bell’s shaped canvases to an exercise he encountered as a student at IU. On a field trip to the Indiana Dunes, a professor of Bell’s had instructed his students to limit their viewfinder to a square foot of sand. While his classmates protested, Bell claims he was inspired. “If you really look,” he wrote, “you will see the subtle nuances of shadow, light and form. How you arrange these elements within the frame will provide substance for many compositions.”
An interactive station in the gallery invites visitors to replicate the exercise at the dunes by raking patterns into the sand in a tiny sandbox and using a Polaroid camera to photograph it. The resulting prints – pinned up nearby -- do in fact evince a surprising variety.
En route to the minimalist canvases he considered his “grand work,” according to Beard, Bell demonstrated remarkable range, to which this small exhibition can only allude. One section of the show features the whimsical pen-and-ink drawings that became illustrations for children’s storybooks—tales of cats from around the world, and American children’s favorite scary stories.
Don G. Bell, storybook illustration, pen and ink. IU Campus Art Collection.
Another wall references the artist’s figural and erotic work. “The paintings of wrestlers, restrained in color,” a critic once wrote about this work, “appear to be about tensed energy and the elegance of the human form in motion.”
Including self-portraits by both Bell and Varga, portraits of one another, and art objects made by friends, the exhibition offers glimpses into an artful shared life that, for Bell, began at Indiana. The show is a portrait of “a person who touched so much of this university,” said Chattin. “Visiting with Bob and learning how important the university was to Don was a big part of this. Bob has repeatedly told me that Don would be floored to know his work was here. We have the capacity to take all these things and disperse them into research and display and the different collections — the Kinsey [Institute], University Archives, Eskenazi — so it can be widely shared.” In addition to the McCalla exhibition, some of Bell’s shaped canvases, oil paintings, and watercolors have been installed in the Eskenazi School’s Mies van der Rohe Building.
Don G. Bell, Wrestlers, oil on canvas. IU Campus Art Collection.
An opening reception for the exhibition "These 'Things' I Call Art: Artwork by Donald Gene Bell" takes place Thursday, November 9 from 5-7 pm at University Collections at McCalla, 525 N. Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408.
