The San Antonio Museum of Art presents Larry Bell: Improvisations, a survey and retrospective that reads like an extended meditation—an invitation to reorient how we encounter the world through light. The exhibition opened on August 29, 2025, in the Cowden Gallery and is on view through January 4, 2026. It charts more than five decades of an artist restlessly experimenting with perception, surface, and the immaterial. It is, at heart, a call to slow down and rediscover the quiet astonishment of looking.
Bell, a seminal voice of the 1960s Los Angeles scene, has spent a lifetime coaxing light into form. As SAMA’s Kelso Director Emily Ballew Neff observes, his works encourage viewers to “engage with their surroundings in new ways”—a proposition that forms the emotional core of the exhibition. Organized by the Phoenix Art Museum and curated by Rachel Sadvary Zebro, with SAMA Associate Curator Lana Meador overseeing the installation, Improvisations gathers an elegant constellation of Bell’s iconic cubes, intimate collages, prismatic works on canvas, and radiant glass sculptures. Meador notes that the sculptures are a “seamless blend of technical precision with visual delight” that defines his practice.
A Monument Returns: The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat
One of the rare pleasures of the exhibition is the reemergence of The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat, a monumental, site-specific installation created for SAMA’s opening in 1981 and seldom displayed in full since. Towering at ten feet, SAMA’s iteration is the largest of its kind—a sculpture that seems to hold light itself captive.
Its title springs from a studio moment of near-magic: Bell’s young daughter wandered into an early sculpture, and because of the mirrored material and her height, only her eyes appeared visible. The image evoked a passage from H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man,” in which Griffin’s experiments render cats invisible, save for their pupils—an allegory of persistence that Bell found deeply resonant. Crafted from panels of a nickel-chrome alloy known as Inconel, the work’s gradated coatings create shifting reflections that seem to breathe with ambient light.
The installation also marks Bell’s enduring relationship with San Antonio. Considered an “honorary San Antonian,” Bell entered the museum’s origin story when founder Nancy Brown Negley and director Jack McGregor—visionaries who saw possibility in the abandoned Lone Star Brewery—commissioned a significant contemporary work for the nascent institution. Griffin’s Cat became both an anchor and a promise: that contemporary art would remain central to SAMA’s identity.
The Artist as Improviser: A Practice Where Art Meets Physics
Born in Chicago in 1939 and raised in California, Bell’s artistic path veered unexpectedly when a job at a picture frame shop revealed the optical alchemy of glass. A single broken shard sparked his fascination with transparency, reflectivity, and absorption—qualities that would shape his life’s work. From this curiosity emerged a highly technical yet deeply intuitive practice.
Central to Bell’s oeuvre is the vacuum deposition tank, an industrial behemoth capable of vaporizing metals into impossibly thin films. These coatings—applied to glass, Mylar, paper, or plastic—interfere with light to create subtle shifts in color and perception, much like the iridescent sheen atop an oil puddle. His process is meticulous, but the spirit guiding it is improvisational, governed by instinct, accident, and the artist’s willingness to trust his materials.
This philosophy crystallizes in his Light Knots, which are born of folding and knotting Mylar sheets used in his collages. Rendered weightless, these twisting forms catch and cast light in constantly changing ways, embodying what Bell calls “the infinite possibilities that can come out of the form, out of the reflection.”
His collages and canvases—laminated layers of Mylar, paper, and metallic coatings—extend this improvisational logic onto flat surfaces. Works such as Austin, named after the artist observed bats erupting from beneath an Austin bridge, use metal frameworks and stencils to interrupt the deposition process, producing subtle shifts in density, shadow, and color.
Bell’s determination to “do something nobody else was doing” was forged in part by an undiagnosed childhood hearing loss. The tension and isolation of those early years led him to pursue a path uniquely his own—one grounded in intuition, invention, and self-reliance.
Light, Space, and the Legacy of a Movement
Bell’s career emerged alongside the “Finish Fetish” and “Light and Space” movements of 1960s Los Angeles—communities of artists who embraced aerospace technologies, industrial fabrication, and the perceptual possibilities of the Southern California sun. Characterized by immaculate surfaces and luminous forms, these movements sought to heighten our awareness of how we sense space. Bell’s work exemplifies and transcends this lineage: restrained yet atmospheric, minimal yet emotionally resonant.
A Generous Illumination
Larry Bell: Improvisations is made possible through the support of The Brown Foundation and the Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation of 1992. Exhibition access is included with general museum admission.
In a world ever quicker to demand conclusions, Bell’s art offers a counterpoint: an invitation to linger in uncertainty, to notice the ephemeral, to see light not as a given but as a collaborator. Through these improvisations, we are reminded—quietly, insistently—of the wonder in simply looking.
Elizabeth Williams is Editor and a Writer for Modern in San Antonio.