KENT SHELL Artist & Writer

Kent Shell is a Carroll Gardens-based painter and writer who grew up in West Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia. His paintings have been shown at PS 1, White Columns, Hallwalls, The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Muranushi-Lederman and Trestle Gallery.

Kent’s work reflects an abiding curiosity around ideas of meaning: meaning as we find it, and meaning as we ascribe it, and is informed by a fluid sense of image as language, language as thought, and seeing as invention. Working within a self-directed language of abstraction, he mines an area that makes room for rigor, permission, and a kind of ‘slip-jointed’ image-making outside of the received language(s) of abstract art. Kent’s writing is likewise fueled by the twin longings of memory and invention, boundedness and deep space. He loves ambiguity, paradox, specificity and complexity, and has lots of ideas. 

Together with Kim Irwin, he conceived and produced The Whiteness Conversation for The Brooklyn Cottage in March 2015, and helped conceive our evening of stories about The Fool in April 2015.

To learn more about Kent, click here.