Lecture by Alexandra Bell: Counternarratives

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Critically acclaimed Alexandra Bell will give a lecture coinciding with the opening of an exhibition of her work at Bennington.

Bell is known for her Counternarratives project of supersized New York Times articles edited to reveal biases and assumptions about race and gender. Usually posted one work at a time around everyday locations in New York City, her Counternarratives prints will appear at Bennington as a series of four installed on building exteriors around campus. This will be the first display of her work by an academic institution and the first to present her radical re-edits as a series. This grouping showcases how the artist disrupts manifestations of bias in reporting on different topics, from police violence to athletic competition, and confounds journalistic conventions of timeliness. Bell resists the forward propulsion of the news cycle by reconsidering events once they cease to be current. Her deliberative process gives agency to a desire to slow down and look back, to locate subjectivity in the “facts” of public record and question how particular narratives become embedded in history. Overall, Bell’s Counternarratives project urges us to think more deeply about the circulation and consumption of news and the patterns and politics of information.