Museum members are invited to preview Paul Reed: A Retrospective before it opens to the public. Spend the day in our galleries and explore this groundbreaking exhibition organized by OKCMOA.
Need more of a reason to celebrate? Join us for the Members’ Preview Celebration on Friday, November 21, from 5 to 8 pm! Learn more here.
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.
