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Alexandra Bell (born 1983) is an American multidisciplinary artist who specializes in using various media types to deconstruct language and explore the tension around race, politics, and culture. She is best known for her Counternarratives project of super-sized New York Times articles edited to reveal biases and assumptions about race and gender. She is a 2018 Infinity Award recipient. Bell received her Masters in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2013 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Background
Bell grew up in Chicago, and even as a child, her mother encouraged critical thinking. She recalls, “Trying to look past what’s in front of me is something I grew up doing a lot of.” Her mother often talked to her about politics of the era, which sometimes involved reading the Chicago Tribune. When she was in middle school during the O.J. Simpson trial, a teacher encouraged her to read the Chicago Defender, a famously black-owned newspaper. In 1994, the controversial Time magazine cover was Simpson with his skin was darkened to make him look more menacing. To Bell, this stands out as one of the first times she remembers being aware of how the media manipulates images of black people.

Education
Bell studied media, race, politics, and film at University of Chicago, graduating in 2005 with a B.A. in interdisciplinary sources (bell). Later that same year, she moved to New York, where she worked as grant writer for a syringe-exchange program. She spent five years in that job before applying to the Columbia School of Journalism in 2011. After seeing a Glenn Ligon show at the Whitney that year, she realized that she wanted to be an artist and experienced a “quarter-life crisis,” which prompted her to take a semester off. She went to Paris for a month and "spent time in an art collective not doing art.” Bell returned and completed her degree in 2013.

Counternarratives series
Bell's "Counternarratives" project is a series of public art projects consisting of redactions of text from stories that ran in the New York Times. It examines media coverage of historically marginalized groups such as African-Americans and highlights the media's often overt biases. Bell describes her work as “..creating a narrative that goes against the dominant narrative put forth by the news.”

A Teenager With Promise
A Teenager with Promise was the first piece of art produced in this series; Bell posted the first iteration of it on a wall in Bedford-Stuyvesant in late December 2016. This artwork is based on The New York Times articles "Darren Wilson Was Low-Profile Officer With Unsettled Early Days" and "A Teenager Who Was Grappling With Problems and Promise." The first article is a profile of Wilson, the police officer who shot an unarmed 18-year old named Michael Brown, and the second article is a profile of Brown that referred to him as "no angel." Bell redacts most of the article and chooses to leave behind only a couple of words that were free of the supposed bias in the New York Times.

Olympic Threat
Olympic Threat is based on The New York Times article "Accused of Fabricating Robbery, Swimmers Fuel Tension in Brazil" about the four American Olympic swimmers who lied about being robbed at gunpoint by men impersonating Brazilian police. Bell rewrites the article in such a way that demonstrates the New York Times' bias when they wrote the article; she especially calls attention to the placement of the photo of a black man, Usain Bolt who had just won gold, over the article about a crime committed by white Americans. Bell says about the photo, “There’s no way, with a better understanding of race and crime and newspapers, that you opt to keep that there."

Tulsa Hate Crime
Tulsa Hate Crime is based on The New York Times article "Tulsa Man, Accused of Harassing Lebanese Family, is Charged With Murder". Bell points out in her art how the newspaper did not mention the race of the white, Tulsa man who was harassing the family and did not state that it was a racially motivated crime that ended in murder.

Venus Williams
Venus Williams is based on 'The New York Times article "58 and Still Fussing"  about the ''"contrasting size and placement of two feature articles on tennis players retired player John McEnroe and Venus Williams." ''

Charlottesville
Charlottesville is based on The New York Times article "White Nationalist Protest Leads to Deadly Violence" and deconstructs how The New York Times presented its article about the racially charged marches in Charlottesville, Va." Bell claims that it should've been the center article, not only half of the page, and that it shouldn't have portrayed the victims of the racially motivated violence as willing combatants.