Paul Reed (1919-2015) was born and raised in Washington, DC, and was a seminal member of a group of artists working in 1960s Washington, DC, which came to be known as the Washington Color School. His art bridged the end of the first generation of Washington Color School artists including Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, and Kenneth Noland; and a second generation of Washington, DC colorists including Alma Thomas, Anne Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Young, and Lou Stovall. Reed was a gifted artist, teacher, and a major contributor to the golden age of painting in the nation’s capital during the 1960s.
This major retrospective, the first devoted to the artist, will present a survey of Reed’s art and accomplishments from his early days as a graphic designer in 1950s New York to his success as one of the founding artists of the Washington Color School in the 1960s to the aesthetic reinventions of his later work. Reed’s life was devoted to art and endless exploration of the many and varied properties of and approaches to form, color, and light. Throughout his career spanning more than eight decades, Reed worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, collage, graphic design, and computer-generated and enhanced imagery. His lifetime achievement as an artist, prolific production, and the variety of materials, techniques, and strategies explored in his art rank him as one of America’s most significant painters active in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Paul Reed: A Retrospective is guest curated by David Gariff, PhD, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, and will consist of over one hundred paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. The checklist is drawn primarily from OKCMOA’s permanent collection with additional loans from important museum and private collections. The exhibition will include a catalogue, published by Marquand Books, featuring essays by the exhibition’s curator and other art historians exploring the life, art, and legacy of Paul Reed, as well as the 1960s cultural history of Washington, DC, and new perspectives on some of the lesser-known aspects of the Washington Color School and its members.
Image Credit: Paul Reed, No. 18I (detail), 1965, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 26 in., Oklahoma City Museum of Art, gift of the Paul and Esther Reed Trust, 2018.022, © Paul and Esther Reed Trust, Image by Google
