Dianne Blell

Dianne Blell
Born	1943 (age 81–82) United States
Nationality	American
Education	Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Fine Arts
Alma mater	San Francisco Art Institute
Known for	Multimedia art, fine art photography, conceptual tableaux
Notable work	Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids (1979), Various Fabulous Monsters (1983), The Pursuit of Love (1985), The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1989), Wildlives (1990), Desire for the Intimate Deity (2007)
Style	Staged photography, performance art, conceptual art
Movement	Conceptual art, postmodernism
Awards	John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 1989 , New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

Dianne Blell (born 1943) is an American multimedia artist and fine art photographer known for her elaborate staged photographs and conceptual tableaux that blend photography with performance, painting, and installation art. Active since the 1970s, Blell often draws on classical mythology, art history, and romantic literature, constructing intricate sets and costumes to recreate or evoke historical artworks in contemporary multimedia compositions. Her work spans early performance art pieces through a series of critically noted photographic projects, including Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids (1979), Various Fabulous Monsters (1983), The Pursuit of Love (1985), The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1989), Wildlives (1990), and Desire for the Intimate Deity (2007), as well as more recent explorations of objects and artifacts. Blell’s art has been exhibited in major galleries and museums, and she has been recognized with awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship. To this day, Blell is still actively showing and is a represented artist in Art Miami 2025.

Biography

Blell was born in 1943 in the United States. She pursued a non-traditional path into art, spending time working as a secretary and then as a Pan Am flight attendant traveling internationally before committing to formal art studies. In 1970 she enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she completed both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in an intensive three-year period. While at art school in the early 1970s, Blell was influenced by the burgeoning conceptual and performance art movements. She later cited a lecture by Tom Marioni – the conceptual artist and founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco – as a turning point that inspired her to foreground artistic “process” and to create works explicitly for the camera. During this period, performance art “happenings” were often documented only through photographs after the fact, which led Blell to ask: “why not just address the camera immediately?” This realization shaped the direction of her early career.

After receiving her graduate degree, Blell moved to New York City by the late 1970s to further her art career. She settled into a loft studio in Lower Manhattan’s Cedar Street, which would serve as the stage for many of her elaborate photographic sets. (Notably, this studio’s proximity to the World Trade Center later figured into her work and life, as it was damaged in the September 11, 2001 attacks—an event that destroyed some of her unfinished sets and prompted her to photograph the aftermath; a number of those images are now held in the collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.) Blell has maintained a dual life between New York City and Bridgehampton, Long Island, continuing to produce art across multiple decades. She has also been honored with several awards and grants recognizing her innovative work, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. In 2012, Blell was interviewed for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, an indication of her significance in the American art landscape and the archival interest in documenting her contributions to art history.

Early performances and conceptual work (1975–1978)

Blell’s initial forays into art were through performance and installation. In the mid-1970s in San Francisco, she staged performances such as Surrealism and the Blues (1975) in which she occupied an abandoned storefront space, appearing as a figure in a high window while blues music played, creating a scene reminiscent of a living surreal tableau. These early time-based artworks combined theatrical presentation with visual art settings, often leaving only photographs as documentation. Blell embraced this intersection of performance and photography, beginning to create art that existed principally as a photographed scenario rather than a live event.

One of her most notable conceptual works of this period was Nude Mocks Broadway (Odalisque) (1976), a provocative billboard project presented in collaboration with the Museum of Conceptual Art. Installed in San Francisco’s North Beach adult entertainment district, the billboard featured a cropped black-and-white photograph of a reclining female nude, posed by Blell’s exercise instructor, who stood in for the artist. The figure, framed only from the knees to the breasts and surrounded by draping fabric, was described by Blell as intentionally unsettling—a fusion of classical form and vulgar context. She recalled: “I put the classical woman dead center in the middle of the Carol Doda-land... she would be surrounded by all this tawdriness.” This scene of the classical intervening into the vulgar went “viral” in newspapers and TV all over the world, as well as circulating as an advertisement for itself in Artforum.” Documentation from the piece is held in multiple private collections and institutions, including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Archives.

By 1978, her work had garnered enough attention to be featured in a solo exhibition at the University Art Museum in Berkeley as part of the MATRIX program (Blell was MATRIX artist #9), an early recognition of her emerging voice in staged photography.

Major photographic series

After 1978, Blell focused on a series of photographic projects that established her signature style of elaborately staged allegorical scenes. In these works, she typically constructed sets, crafted costumes, and often performed as a model herself, producing images that draw on art historical iconography and explore themes of love, desire, and myth. Art critic Donald Kuspit noted that Blell’s method of re-staging classical images as “photo-tableaux” effectively “breathes new aesthetic life into them,” causing viewers to reconsider the meaning of the original artworks through her contemporary lens.

Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids (1979)

Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids was Blell’s breakthrough series, created in 1978–1979 and shown at the Robert Stefanotti Gallery in New York in 1979. The series consisted of nine photographs that reference classical portraits of women from art history as well as motifs from fashion photography. In these images, Blell herself appears as the model, styled in contemporary designer clothing and posed in scenarios that juxtapose the romantic imagery of cherubs and goddesses with modern urban settings. For example, in one photograph titled Pursuing Urban Cupid, Blell reaches toward a winged cherub suspended just out of her grasp; this scene was shot on the roof of her downtown Manhattan loft, with the open sky and the World Trade Center towers visible behind her. Another image, Future Perfect, portrays Blell as a winged Cupid figure with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant looming in the distance. Through such ironic pairings, Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids explored the “supplanting of the painted portrait by advertising and photography as a record of status” and its role in shaping ideals of desire. The series established Blell’s approach of blending classical allegory with contemporary cultural commentary. It was well received, earning mention in art publications; a review in Artforum (March 1979) noted Blell’s unique fusion of Lucas Cranach–style Old Master imagery with the glossy aesthetics of 1970s fashion shoots.

Various Fabulous Monsters (1983)

In 1983, Blell presented the series Various Fabulous Monsters at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, marking her first solo show with the legendary dealer. This body of work continued Blell’s project of reimagining classical art in a photographic medium. The title invokes fantastical beasts, and the images indeed draw inspiration from mythological and neo-classical paintings. Blell specifically based compositions on works by artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joseph-Marie Vien, and Angelica Kauffman, among other 18th-century painters. In creating the photographs, Blell painstakingly built elaborate stage sets in her loft and hand-crafted period costumes to faithfully echo the source material, then enlivened these scenes with the presence of living models (including herself) and contemporary visual twists. For instance, one of the notable pieces, Seraph, features a figure modeled after a classical winged angel but rendered in a vivid, theatrically lit tableau that blurs the boundary between an old-master painting and a movie still. By restaging these “fabulous” monsters and figures from art history, Blell invited a dialogue between past and present depictions of heroism, beauty, and the grotesque. Critics noted the series for its ambitious scale and art-historical rigor; an article in Art in America praised Blell’s photographs for “illustrating the seduction of classical form while slyly critiquing its ideals from a modern standpoint.”

The Pursuit of Love (1985)

Blell’s next major series, The Pursuit of Love, debuted in 1985, again at Leo Castelli Gallery. Like its predecessor, this series was based on specific art-historical compositions, focusing on scenes of courtship and romantic pursuit drawn from Neo-Classical and Rococo paintings. Blell recreated works by artists such as François Boucher and others, using live models to stand in for amorous couples from mythology and literature. The photographs often feature partially nude figures arranged in classical poses amid opulent, stage-like settings. Blell’s technique remained entirely analog at this time: each scene was carefully diagrammed and rehearsed, hundreds of Polaroid test shots were taken, and finally the tableaux were captured on 4×5 inch color film—well before the era of digital editing. The artist then presented the finished images as large Cibachrome prints, emphasizing their lush color and detail. The Pursuit of Love further solidified Blell’s reputation for reviving historical imagery through a feminist and contemporary perspective. Donald Kuspit, writing about Various Fabulous Monsters and Pursuit of Love, remarked that "she breathes new aesthetic life into them,” compelling the viewer to both admire and question the ideals of beauty and love portrayed in those source works. This series was also notable for the way Blell integrated the trappings of fashion photography (such as stylish makeup, lighting, and credits given to stylists in the final presentation) with fine art, reflecting her interest in the crossover between high art and popular imagery. A print from The Pursuit of Love series, Love Fleeing Slavery (a reinterpretation of a 1789 Vien painting), entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, donated by Blell and Castelli—an indication of the work’s significance and reception.

The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1989)

At the end of the 1980s, Blell’s work took a more personal and surreal turn with the series The Circus Animals’ Desertion (the title references a William Butler Yeats poem of the same name). Created around 1988–1989, this series revolves around dreamlike narratives rather than direct re-staging of known paintings. The images feature a young girl protagonist—an autobiographical surrogate for Blell herself—encountering mysterious figures, symbolic objects, and uncanny landscapes in a carnival-like atmosphere. Blell has described these scenes as emerging from her own dreams and subconscious, with the “young girl” symbolizing herself at a crossroads of life experience. In one composition from the series, titled Certainty in the Land of Enigmas, the girl stands on one side of a stream (suggested to be the “stream of consciousness”) in a barren dreamscape, reaching out toward a man on the opposite bank who offers her flowers; the tableau evokes a meeting of past and present, child and father, reality and imagination. The visual style of these works drew inspiration from modernist art as well—Blell cites Pablo Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905) as an influence on the desert-like setting and somber mood of the circus figures. Technically, The Circus Animals’ Desertion was a tour de force: after being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, Blell collaborated with a graphics engineering firm to incorporate advanced post-production techniques, integrating multiple separately photographed elements into seamless surreal images. This digital-assisted process was cutting-edge at the time, bridging the gap between traditional photography and painting-like montage. Works from this series were later exhibited under various titles; the series’ blend of personal psychology and mythic reference marked an evolution in Blell’s oeuvre, demonstrating that her conceptual multimedia compositions could delve into introspective narrative territory.

Wildlives (1990)

Blell used the momentum and resources of the Guggenheim Fellowship to embark on an ambitious project in 1990 that differed from her previous studio-bound allegories. Titled Wildlives, this series involved photographic safari expeditions to capture portraits of wildlife in their natural habitats, particularly focusing on Africa’s diminishing animal populations. Motivated by concerns about global ecology and the fate of endangered species, Blell traveled to East Africa on safari, where she photographed animals such as elephants, lions, and zebras with the same sense of portraiture and empathy that she previously brought to human subjects. The resulting images, often set against dramatic skies or landscapes, highlight individual animals as characters with personality and poignancy. Wildlives was exhibited in the early 1990s (including a show at Castelli Gallery in 1991), and represented Blell’s effort to merge her art practice with activism and documentary impulses. While superficially a departure from her staged mythological scenes, these works continued Blell’s exploration of the theme of an idealized nature and the human desire to connect with other living beings. By framing wildlife photography as fine art portraiture, Blell contributed to a dialogue about the role of photography in conservation.

Desire for the Intimate Deity (2000–2008)

After the turn of the millennium, Blell revisited the themes of ideal love and mythic romance in a new series entitled Desire for the Intimate Deity, created between 2000 and 2008 (often referenced by the date 2007 for exhibitions). In this body of work, Blell took inspiration from the mythology of Hindu folklore, specifically the love between the god Krishna and the cowherd maiden Radha – a classic story representing the soul’s yearning for union with the divine. In a suite of images that mine Indian artistic traditions, Blell staged Radha and Krishna in various stages of courtship and love-play, consciously modeling the aesthetics of the photographs on Moghul miniature paintings and other South Asian courtly art. The artist sourced authentic costumes and props reminiscent of Indian textiles and jewelry, and even mimicked the rich color palettes and flattened spaces characteristic of traditional miniatures.

Technically, Desire for the Intimate Deity marked Blell’s first extensive use of digital compositing: the figures (portrayed by hired models in New York) and the backgrounds were photographed separately on large-format film, then scanned and seamlessly merged in post-production to create the final scenes. This process allowed Blell to achieve a heightened fantasy quality and to overcome practical limitations (for example, models did not need to be photographed together or on location, enabling more complex compositions). Despite the digital assembly, Blell continued to paint and design the sets by hand, maintaining the tactile, crafted sensibility of her earlier work. The series was exhibited under titles like The Intimate Deity and received attention for its cross-cultural exploration of love and devotion. Critics noted that Blell’s use of non-Western source material expanded her inquiry into archetypal romance beyond the Eurocentric classics of her 1980s work, suggesting a universality in humanity’s “pursuit of love.” These works also invite a post-colonial reading in the way a Western artist engages with Eastern iconography; however, Blell approached the subject with deep research and respect for the originals, aiming to invoke the spirit of the Radha-Krishna lore rather than appropriate it superficially.

Recent works: artifacts and objects (2010s–present)

In the mid-2010s, Blell’s artistic attention turned toward more minimal yet evocative subjects: standalone objects and artifacts imbued with personal or historical significance. Departing from the populated scenes of her earlier tableaux, she began creating stark photographs of single antique pieces against black backgrounds, a series sometimes referred to as Artifacts of the Contemporary. Examples from this ongoing work include images of weathered ornate chairs, a diminutive leafless tree, and other timeworn decorative objects, each presented as if it were a sculptural portrait. Blell’s approach treats these objects as survivors of history – often damaged or aged – highlighting their beauty, fragility, and “afterlife” in a modern context. By isolating them in dramatic lighting against void-like space, she gives them a dignity akin to how one might photograph a precious relic for a museum or auction catalog. One notable subset, dubbed the Tragic Chairs, features life-size 18th-century style chairs with peeling paint and missing cane work, symbolizing bygone elegance and the passage of time. These were exhibited in 2019 at MM Fine Art in Southampton, New York, to critical interest.

In contextualizing this late phase of Blell’s work, commentators have noted that even without human figures, the artist continues her exploration of idealized beauty and decay – themes that have been present since her earliest performances. The objects, much like her previous living subjects, stand in as storytellers and symbols. By focusing on artifacts, Blell also directly engages with the concept of the “vanitas” still life (the meditation on mortality through objects) and invites comparisons to contemporary photographers who create typologies of things. This recent evolution underscores Blell’s versatility and her sustained interest in how images can capture the poignancy of time, memory, and desire, whether through people, animals, or inanimate remnants of culture.

Exhibitions and recognition

Dianne Blell’s work has been exhibited in prominent venues and has entered important collections over the course of her career. In the early 1980s she was represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, a significant endorsement for a young woman artist at that time. Castelli gave Blell solo shows for Various Fabulous Monsters in 1983 and The Pursuit of Love in 1985 at his 79th Street gallery, bringing her staged photographic tableaux to the attention of the broader art world. She continued to show with Castelli into the early 1990s, including the Wild Lives exhibition in 1991 which showcased her wildlife portraits. Earlier, Blell had also exhibited at alternative and regional spaces; for instance, her Charmed Heads and Urban Cupids series was shown at Robert Stefanotti Gallery in 1979 and at Hallwalls (an art center in Buffalo) in 1983, reflecting the cross-country interest in her work. In 1984, the Houston Center for Photography presented a selection of Blell’s works from Charmed Heads... and Various Fabulous Monsters, indicating recognition from the photographic arts community as well.

Blell’s photographs have been acquired by major museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds her piece Love Fleeing Slavery (1983) in its collection of photographs, as noted above. The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art have also exhibited Blell’s work in group shows, highlighting the unique hybrid quality of her art which resonates in contexts of both photography and painting. Her series dealing with myth and love were included in thematic exhibitions about staged photography and contemporary allegorical art during the 1990s. In addition, Blell’s connection to the events of 9/11 – through her downtown studio – led to some of her documentary photographs of Ground Zero being collected by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, marking a poignant footnote in her artistic journey.

Blell has presented solo exhibitions at venues including the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art (LAICA), the Elvehjem (Chazen) Museum of Art in Madison, and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Her artwork has also been featured in group shows at prestigious institutions such as the previously mentioned Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Over the years, Blell has received numerous honors. In 1989 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of creative photography, which was instrumental in enabling the Circus Animals’ Desertion and Wildlives projects. She has also received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Arts Fellowship. In 2012, as part of an effort to document significant American artists, Blell was invited for an oral history interview by the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution), securing her legacy in the annals of American art history through firsthand testimony.

Influence and legacy

Blell’s artistic approach—melding self-performance, elaborate set construction, and photographic image-making—has positioned her within a lineage of innovative late-20th-century artists who blurred the boundaries between photography and other art forms. Her early self-staged photographs of the late 1970s have been discussed in parallel with Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills (begun in 1977), as both artists used themselves as models to enact various roles and archetypes for the camera. However, critics have pointed out that while Sherman drew from cinema and pop culture tropes, Blell’s work “resonates more directly” with art historical and mythological imagery. Stuart Comer observed that Blell, working in New York around the same time as Sherman, cited sources ranging from contemporary fashion photographer Arthur Elgort to Old Master painters like Lucas Cranach, and that Blell’s photographs function simultaneously as constructed images and as records of a performative act. This dual nature (both tableau and performance document) in Blell’s work aligns her with a broader trend in 1970s art in which women artists turned the camera on themselves to assert control over representation—placing Blell in dialogue with figures like Sherman, Eleanor Antin, and Hanna Wilke.

Moreover, Blell’s emphasis on the female form and romantic narrative can be seen as part of the feminist-inflected examination of gender and sexuality in art. Her performative use of her own body (especially in the 1970s works) recalls the precedent of Carolee Schneemann, the groundbreaking performance artist who similarly used self-display and theatrical scenarios to challenge viewers. While Blell’s imagery is less visceral and confrontational than Schneemann’s, the concept of a woman artist orchestrating elaborate scenes to convey her perspective was still a bold artistic stance in that era. Art researcher Rachel M. Ward has noted that Blell, Schneemann, and their contemporaries expanded the possibilities for women artists by embracing new media and techniques; in Blell’s case, this included pioneering what Ward calls “pre-Photoshop photomanipulation” – creating complex composite images entirely by hand and camera before digital tools were available. This innovative spirit has earned Blell a place among those artists who anticipated the digital age’s compositing and theatricality through analog means.

Blell’s work has also influenced younger artists interested in narrative and tableau photography. The lush, staged quality of her images—bridging painting and photography—prefigures later art photographers who create fictional worlds in their work (such as Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, albeit with very different thematic concerns). In retrospect, Blell’s meticulously crafted allegories contribute to the postmodern discourse of the 1980s, which often involved appropriation and re-contextualization of past imagery. By appropriating the compositions of canonical art and restaging them, Blell was engaging in a form of appropriation art parallel to that of 18th century painters such as Angelica Kauffman and Joseph Marie Vien, yet her approach remained distinct in its earnest, sumptuous re-creations rather than ironic copies.

Today, Dianne Blell is recognized as a unique figure who helped expand fine art photography’s range, incorporating multimedia elements and performative processes at a time when such practices were nascent. Her archives and artworks continue to be studied for their inventive fusion of disciplines. As the art historian James Crump wrote, “Blell’s photographs collapse time, converging 19th-century salon painting, 1970s performance, and postmodern commentary into single frames,” thereby securing her legacy as an innovator in the development of staged photography as a serious art form.

External links

• Official website
• Oral history interview at the Archives of American Art