Artist Larry Bell joins Randy Kennedy and James Merle Thomas at Site Santa Fe, on Saturday, November 14, 2-3:30 pm MST, to discuss his career and Improvisations.
Innovative Thinker Series: Larry Bell
Saturday, November 14, 2-3:30 pm MST
Site Santa Fe
As part of Site Santa Fe’s Innovative Thinker Series, artist Larry Bell joins writer and curator Randy Kennedy and James Merle Thomas, deputy director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, to discuss his work and contributions to postwar American art and sculpture.
Moderated by the exhibition’s curator, Rachel Zebro, the conversation will bring together Bell’s firsthand account of his work with Kennedy’s critical perspective and Thomas’s engagement with the history of postwar abstraction. The speakers will discuss Bell’s six-decade career, his experimentation with glass, light, material, and space, and the ways Improvisations relates to the broader history of American abstraction and sculpture.
Larry Bell has lived and worked in Taos since 1973, making Larry Bell: Improvisations (October 16, 2026–January 11, 2027), his first exhibition at Site Santa Fe, a significant presentation in the region. “I like the idea of improbable things,” Bell once remarked, as if to summarize the relentless pursuit of new forms that has defined his six-decade career. Inventing his own materials even as he wields them, Bell has developed a singular method, adapting industrial techniques to achieve luminous works of art. Improvisations spans forty years of his two- and three-dimensional practice, featuring glass sculptures—from tabletop constructions to large, freestanding installations—and wall-mounted works in various media. The exhibition originated at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, traveled to San Antonio, Texas, and concludes its tour in New Mexico, where the artist has lived and worked for over fifty years.
Bell emerged in the 1960s in tandem with the West Coast brand of Minimalism known as Light and Space, and quickly became one of the most renowned abstract artists of his generation. Glass has long been his signature medium. Bell’s transparent panes attain stunning chromatic variation through his unique process for treating glass: coating it with thin films of vaporized metals inside a vacuum chamber known as “The Tank.” That alchemy extends to his collages and works on paper that generate prismatic effects, harnessing optical phenomena to color how we think and feel. Bell’s slick cubes show no traces of human touch yet stem from his hands-on experiments—a manual process of trial and error that is as intuitive as it is personal. Improvisations highlights that element of surprise in Bell’s work and the wonder it induces: “In my opinion all artwork is stored energy,” he has said, unlocked by the viewer’s embodied response.
Site Santa Fe’s Innovative Thinker Series brings leading cultural figures to Santa Fe to illuminate cross-disciplinary contemporary issues. The series was established as an annual event to honor Site Santa Fe’s former director of education, Juliet Myers.
Special thanks to the Gale Family Foundation for their leading support of the Innovative Thinker Series.
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