VEDA REED | New Works

VEDA REED New Works

This exhibition marks the ninetieth birthday celebration of Veda Reed. Born in Granite, Oklahoma on 5 January 1934, Reed, since the early 1950s, has made Memphis her home. The Gallery is exceedingly proud to show this group of new works – small, sparkly studies and large, luminous paintings - by a remarkable woman of vision and independence.

Reed is revered for her long career of creating sublime, luminous, large-scale paintings of skies, cloudscapes, and the cycles of the sun and moon. Inspired by her childhood in wide-open spaces of Oklahoma, her works represent moments of warmth and comfort experienced while witnessing nature.

Working in isolation and silence, her studio practice reflects the flow of the atmospheres she depicts. She reduces images to their essential forms and then amplifies their presence through selective composition, brilliant palettes, and a painstaking process of layering pigment and glaze. Her incredibly smooth, seamless surfaces create perceptual effects ranging from a subtle, vibrating glow to pure radiance.

For Reed, the act of painting is a spiritual journey toward truth and beauty and a celebration of cycles of renewal.

She received a BFA from the Memphis College of Art and studied at Siena College in Memphis and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. During her long tenure as faculty member, dean and professor emerita at MCA Reed taught a legion of artists how to look, think and react.

Her work as an educator did not deter from art making, and she has shown in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries across the U.S. over the course of eight decades. In fact, when The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2017, and it marked her third solo exhibition at that institution. Her work hangs in many public collections, including The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Rhodes College, Memphis; Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville; State University of New York at Binghampton; The Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Tucson Museum of Art; and newly at the Memphis International Airport.

Among her many accolades and honors, in 1996 - in the middle of her long career - Reed received the prestigious Tennessee Governor’s Award in the Arts.

Those accomplishments are fantastic, but what is more inspiring is that the age of 89 Reed was preparing for yet another solo exhibition of paintings! Happy birthday Veda!

DAVID LUSK GALLERY memphis | nashville davidluskgallery.com