Renowned New York abstract painter and Reed College alumnus David Reed returns to the college for a one-person exhibition of paintings created over the last three decades, from 1965 to the immediate present. Entitled Lives of Paintings, this diachronic installation brings together interrelated bodies of David Reed’s work: early gestural landscapes, time-based performative paintings from the 1970s, and large-scale, intensely optical paintings from the last twenty years. Each body of work illuminates the strategies and nuances of the others, exploring the “lives” of the paintings within the intimate conversational space of the Cooley. To investigate the lives of the paintings as social objects, the Cooley Gallery is publishing an experimental monograph that includes a collection of individual, large-format reproductions of each painting in the exhibition; and the translocational "life story" of each painting is explored through essays and photographs. Designed by Joshua Berger of PLAZM in collaboration with the artist, the monograph includes essays by Jeffrey Kipnis, Lisa Ann Favero, and Reed College Professor Emeritus Charles Rhyne; a conversation with exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder; and a preface by Reed College Professor of Art Michael Knutson.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Completing his 1968 painting thesis at Reed College with Willard (Bill) Midgette, David Reed cites Reed College as the catalyst for his artistic awakening, and the milieu in which he first experienced the intellectual and material rigor of artistic life. Before returning to Reed to complete his degree, David Reed studied painting with Philip Guston and Milton Resnick at the New York Studio School. David Reed has had solo exhibitions at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York since 1976. Large exhibitions of his paintings and video installations traveled to US museums in 1998 and 2005, and to European museums in 1995 and 2001. David Reed has received grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and received the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 2001 and the Ursula Blickle Foundation Art Award in 2002. David Reed initiated and advised the exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75. High Times, Hard Times was curated by Katy Siegel and organized by the iCI, Independent Curators International, New York. Traveling for three years to numerous institutions, the exhibition not only captured a tumultuous period of political and social change, but also reflected the impact of the civil rights struggle, student and anti-war activism, and the beginnings of feminism in the art world.