DIANNE BLELL
MULTIMEDIA FINE ART

Dianne Blell is a multimedia visual artist working in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York. Using her favored 4x5 large format, alongside a Digital Canon in her current body of work — Artifacts (working title, 2019-current) — she is digitally enlivening long collected fragments, frayed furnishings and ephemera from her past studio and set designs. In 1989, Dianne received a Guggenheim Fellowship based on her pioneering work in early digital image scanning techniques, which culminated in her Circus Animals Desertion (1989) solo show at the Leo Castelli gallery and write-ups in numerous software magazines of the time. 

 

With the remaining funds from her Guggenheim Fellowship and additional sponsorship by Canon, she shot 35mm film while in the field photographing wildlife in Africa. With this body of her work, her next solo show, Wild Lives, premiered at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1991. She also appeared on ABC — photographing Richard Leakey during his Interview with Diane Sawyer on 20/20 — as well as in numerous books and magazines such as National Geographic, Mirabella and Elle. 

 

Upon returning from Africa, she continued to use 4x5 film and a View camera, and was an early adopter of Photoshop. Her photo-manipulated, mytho-scape series Desire for the Intimate Deity (2008) was completed in 2007. This work took her nearly a decade to complete after her studio — located at Ground Zero adjacent to the WTC — and its contents were destroyed in 9/11. Once a shooting location for her early work, her photos of the aftermath of this tragedy were photographed from the rooftop of and through her studio windows — some of these images are now included in the collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

 

For the majority of her career, Dianne was represented by the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City from 1982 until its closing in 2000. While there, she had four one-person shows. Dianne is currently represented by Holden Luntz Gallery and her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Parrish Museum, Guild Hall of East Hampton, Neuberger Museum, New Britain Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, and the Chazen Art Museum (full list below).