Don Gene Bell Born 1935
American, Painter

Don Gene Bell was born in Indiana and raised in Fairborn, Ohio. He attended art school in Chicago at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and had a brief stint as a commercial artist before being drafted into the Army. He was sent to Ludwigsburg , Germany where he acquired the artist position in the 5 th Army Helicopter Unit.

After the Army, he returned to Indiana University and studied art and art history. He received his BA and MFA degrees in the sixties and went on to become the Curator of Exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology and History on the Bloomington campus. He then joined the art faculty of Indiana University in 1965 and developed traveling exhibits and other exhibitions for the art museum.

From there he was hired at Binghamton University (SUNY Binghamton) in 1968 where he was the head of the design area until he retired in 1997. In the late 1970s he exhibited at the Robert Samuels Gallery in New York when showing the erotic male nude became an important subject in art. In 1983 Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman began showing his work in the Leslie/Lohman Gallery. It was there at LLGAF that he received both the encouragement and support to continue the gay theme in his work. Don now works in his studio in Tucson , Arizona where he and his life-partner continue to produce art with a variety of themes.