First major retrospective of Washington Color School artist opens November 22, 2025
OKLAHOMA CITY (Feb. 25, 2025) – The Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) today announced its fall exhibition, Paul Reed: A Retrospective, which will run from November 22, 2025, through April 12, 2026. This is the first major retrospective devoted to Paul Reed (1919-2015), who, despite his major contributions to the new direction of abstract art in the 1960s, has remained largely overlooked in this important narrative.
Paul Reed: A Retrospective finally shines a light on the artist, offering a comprehensive exploration of his extraordinary seven-decade career. Organized chronologically, the exhibition 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 and technological reinventions of his later work.
In 1968, OKCMOA, then the Oklahoma Art Center, purchased the collection of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (WGMA), which had organized the groundbreaking traveling exhibition The Washington Color Painters, featuring Reed. In 2017 and 2018, the Paul and Esther Reed Trust donated a significant collection of Reed’s paintings and works on paper to the Museum, making OKCMOA the definitive home of his work.
“Paul Reed’s foundational role within the Washington Color School and his many decades of innovation justify a much greater reputation than he has held previously,” said President and CEO Michael Anderson, PhD. “With this exhibition, we are excited to introduce our community to the full scope of Reed’s art, and consequently to his incredible contribution to postwar American art.”
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 on Reed by the exhibition’s curator and other art historians, as well as the 1960s cultural history of Washington, D.C., and new perspectives on some of the lesser-known aspects of the Washington Color School and its members.
Reed’s painting No. 17 (1964) was included in the exhibition Matisse in His Time in 2016, which helped set in motion the gift of 125 works from the Paul and Esther Reed Trust. In 2023, the Museum presented Paul Reed: Works on Paper, which highlighted a selection of prints, photographic collages, and oil pastels created between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Additionally, one of his paintings, Topeka, is currently on view in the installation Postwar Abstraction.
Paul Reed: A Retrospective will close out a monumental year at OKCMOA following the currently-on-view From the Vault: The 80th Anniversary Exhibition, the March 8 reopening of the Museum’s Chihuly exhibition as Dale Chihuly: The Oklahoma Collection, and this summer’s Discovering Ansel Adams, organized by the Center for Creative Photography and opening June 7.
Sponsorships for Paul Reed: A Retrospective are currently available. For more information, please contact Chief Development Officer Kimberley Worrell at 405.278.8227.
Members and children 17 and under see these and all other exhibitions for free. For more information on memberships and to purchase tickets, please visit okcmoa.com.
—
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
