About Pamela Bell

Bio

Pamela Bell is an entrepreneur, advocate, and artist. She is the founder of prinkshop, a social enterprise that creates advocacy campaigns that are designed to be worn. prinkshop, which produces in the USA, aims to create jobs, instigate change, and mobilize people to wear what they care about. (www.prinkshop.com)

As one of the four founding partners of the iconic brands Kate Spade and Jack Spade, which they started with a borrowed jeep and some savings, Pamela led many areas of business including product development, merchandising, retail store development, e-commerce, and global licensing. For 15 years, she worked closely with Kate Spade, Andy Spade and Elyce Arons, until they sold the company to Neiman Marcus in 2008.

Pamela is a longtime supporter of mental health for all. In 2012, she founded the Bowery Arts Project in New York City, which offers therapeutic art classes to clients of the non-medical detox unit at Project Renewal. The volunteer-led initiative, which runs twice a week, serves low-income and homeless men and women working towards renewing their lives with health, homes, and jobs.

In 2019, Pamela joined designer Kenneth Cole as a co-founder, creative partner, and board member of The Mental Health Coalition, which aims to raise awareness and destigmatize conversations around mental health issues.

Pamela also explores her own experiences with loss, family transitions, and renewal in her work as a collage artist. Her work was recently exhibited in a solo show at the Waverly Gallery in Southhampton, NY, July 2021. (www.pamelabellcollageworks.com)

Her commitment to the arts extends to her role as Tony Voter and an Advisory Committee member of The American Theatre Wing.  She is also a Disruptor Fellow, a member of the CFDA, and is a Lang Center Innovation Fellow at Columbia Business School.

Words on work

Color and pattern always feel like a second language to me. The process of creating collage is a lifelong love and practice. A path in business that satisfies my desire to create things and use color as a means to an end has been my vocation throughout my career.

The making of this body of work conjures up deep feelings I long ago buried or had not known existed. This work is self-care, a meditation, and a therapy of sorts. This decade has been a time of monumental transition for my family — children growing into young adults, the loss of loved ones, and the loss of our familial home. The shapes and papers and paint become a daily practice, screen printing, cutting, tearing, and gluing. Making, breaking down, and putting all back together on a blank canvas of sorts. A process that is in many ways parallel to the cultural shift in our country. Breaking down old views – tearing apart the status quo and re-building what, one hopes, to be a better world.

The entire series is an intervention with art history. All the collages in this series are created over book pages by male artists, reimagined with color, emotion, and desire. The shapes covering the pages mimic the position female artists, as well as women in many other careers, have had throughout time. These pages provide a space for women to reflect on the space they take up in the world, the space they deserve.

My dream is that this work will emit an energy of hope, inspiring others to feel their grief and emerge with forgiveness, for both themselves and others. Allowing the viewer to see the world with a newfound joy about the beautiful imperfect journey that brings us all here now and pushes us all to test out limiting beliefs.

Pamela Bell

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Exhibitions and Features

Solo Shows

Mercer Gallery, South Hampton, NY - June 2021
P Gallery, Summit, NJ - May 2024

Group Shows

Bravin Lee Projects, Group Book Show - June 2024

Current Exhibitions

Selected works at L'Epicuriste, Main Street, Bridgehampton
Selected works at Patrick Meile, William Street, Greenwich, CT

Features

Featured Artist in Juniper Magazine, 2022
Featured in Patrick Meile Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse - May 2024