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Robert Reed (’58)
Reva Goodwin Lewie (’56)
Virginia Evans Smit (’58)
Robert Reed was 16 when he arrived at Morgan to study under Alberto Sangiamo and James Lewis. After graduating, Reed continued his studies at the Yale School of Art and received an additional bachelor’s and a master’s in fine arts. In later years, his solo exhibitions included shows at the Whitney and Bayly Museums, the Washburn in New York and the McIntosh in Atlanta. His work also became part of permanent collections across the country, including the Hirshhorn, the Walker and the Whitney. Reed’s portraits are distinct in their geometric themes. His art is a study of tones and shapes that investigate the energy and optical effects of form. Through paint, the artist creates complex canvases with layered textures that add to the portrait’s three-dimensionality. Ideograms are visual documents about the artist’s past and the techniques he uses to move from past to future to present. This suggests, as with Dr. Randall Craig, that Reed’s work is a journal of memory, real and contrived.
“We had sculpture on the lower floor, and at the same time, the music people had singing. So, we were banging, and they were singing,” Reva Lewie says laughingly, as she describes working in tight quarters as a student in Morgan’s then newly developing art department. “That was in 1953, and the campus, of course, was nothing like it is today.” “(Professor Charles) Stallings and (Morgan museum and art department founder) James Lewis really had an impact on my career and, I think, on all of the students’ careers,” says Lewie, who went on to earn a master’s degree at New York University, return to Baltimore and become an educator. “James Lewis was way ahead of his time. He was an excellent sculptor, and he inspired his students.” “When I retired from teaching, I built a studio onto my home,” says the 1988 National Education Association Teacher of the Year. “So, I’m able to work there. I like color and have been working with glass — sort of a mosaictype thing where I take small pieces of stained glass and work them into abstract expressionist creations.” “I always exhibited some but never really marketed my work. I did it more for the joy of doing it,” she says. “Work has sold by word of mouth, one person telling another.”
“…There was this new guy, Alberto Sangiamo,” Virginia Evans Smit recalls from her days as a student at Morgan. “Mr. Lewis had hired him from Yale. Sangiamo had just gotten his master’s, and he was new to teaching. He, in essence, gave us everything he had learned at Yale, which was wonderful.” Evans Smit credits Sangiamo’s teachings with preparing her to compete in the master of fine arts program at the University of Pennsylvania, where many of the other students had attended other Ivy League schools. “As far as painting, which was my major there, I never felt inadequate in any way. I never felt that I had missed something, and I participated in the art shows at the university,” she relates. “One year, I won a first prize. The second year, I won the Thornton Oakley Medal for Achievement in Creative Art. So, I felt that my background at Morgan had served me well.” After she completed her M.F.A., her plans to teach on the college level were placed on hold when she married and moved to New York. She started print-making when she was pregnant with her first child. “To this day, I’m still pretty much a printmaker, although a lot of my work has a ‘paintedly’ quality to it. And, now, I do all kinds of prints, not just woodcuts,” she says. “At this point in my life, I’m just enjoying making art,” says Evans Smit, who is now retired and spends five months a year in Barbados. “And, I am enjoying showing the stuff.”
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MORGAN MAGAZINE VOLUME II 2008