Richard Bell and his work Pay the Rent, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 200×200 cm. Photographed by Rhett Hammerton, Madman Entertainment.
Richard Bell: An artist. An activist. An agitator.
Richard Bell was born on 13 December 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang peoples. His family lived in a tin shack constructed from scraps outside the town (Indigenous people were not permitted to shop in Charleville at the time) and the shack was later demolished by local authorities in 1967. His father worked as a drover and cane cutter and was frequently absent. His mother died when he was seventeen. Bell dropped out of high school and worked as a toolmaker before moving to Sydney, where in the 1970s and 1980s he was involved in Aboriginal rights activism in Redfern and worked as a community worker for the NSW Aboriginal Legal Service. He is self-taught as an artist.
Bell began exhibiting in the early 1990s, co-founding the Campfire Group in 1990, one of the first collectives of urban Aboriginal artists in Brisbane. In 2002 he published the essay "Bell's Theorem: Aboriginal Art, It's a White Thing," a polemical critique of the commodification of Aboriginal art by the global market and the patronising attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians toward Indigenous culture. The following year his painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell's Theorem), a large canvas emblazoned with the phrase "Aboriginal Art / It's a White Thing," won the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. At the award ceremony Bell wore a t-shirt that courted further controversy. In 2003 he also co-founded proppaNOW, a Brisbane-based collective of urban Aboriginal artists including Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert and Gordon Hookey.
Bell works across painting, installation, video and performance. His most significant ongoing work is Embassy (2013–ongoing), a canvas tent surrounded by protest signs modelled on the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy pitched on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra in January 1972, which Bell has called "Australia's greatest work of performance art." Embassy has been staged at the Moscow Biennale (2013), Performa 15 in New York (2015), the Biennale of Sydney (2016), the Jerusalem Show (2016), and Tate Modern, London (2023). At the 2019 Venice Biennale, after being rejected by the official Australian Pavilion selection process, Bell drove a chained replica of the Australian Pavilion through the canals of Venice on a motorised barge. In 2021 the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia presented You Can Go Now, the largest Australian solo exhibition of his work. In 2022 he showed new paintings and installations at documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany.
Bell is represented in most major national and state collections in Australia and has described his practice as "an act of protest." He lives and works in Brisbane.
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