Sustainer members are invited to preview OKCMOA’s newest exhibition, Paul Reed: A Retrospective.
5 pm | Reception in the Museum Lobby
6 pm | Lecture in the Noble Theater
8 pm | Galleries close
RSVP today! Send an email to rsvp@okcmoa.com or call 405.278.8207.
Not a Sustainer member? Join now or upgrade your membership at okcmoa.com/membership.
ABOUT THE LECTURE
Paul Reed (1919-2015), one of the original six Washington Color School painters, earned national notoriety for his complex series of colorful, stained, and shaped-canvas paintings. OKCMOA was gifted 125 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by the Paul and Esther Reed Trust, establishing the Museum as one of the largest public collections of Reed’s work. David Gariff, PhD, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art and guest curator of this first-ever retrospective of Paul Reed’s work, discusses the art, life, and legacy of this important Washington, DC, artist.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Gariff, PhD | Curator of Paul Reed: A Retrospective
David Gariff, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A specialist in modern art, the history of film, and the art of the Italian Renaissance, he has taught art history at The Catholic University of America, the University of Wisconsin, Cleveland State University, Trinity Washington University, and the University of Maryland, College Park. David has held fellowships in Italy at the University of Florence, the University of Pisa, and the Institute for the History of Lombard Art in Milan. He lectures and writes widely on topics related to modern art, film, and Italian culture.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
This major retrospective, the first devoted to the artist, will present a survey of Paul 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 six 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.
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Paul Reed, No. 3A (detail), 1965, acrylic on canvas, 44 × 57 1/4 in., Oklahoma City Museum of Art, gift of the Paul and Esther Reed Trust, 2018.019, © Paul and Esther Reed Trust, Image by Google
