Experiencing the Bauhaus while Black… Mr. Robert Reed an African American Painter&nb

Experiencing the Bauhaus while Black… 

Mr. Robert Reed an African American Painter  from Yale School of Art, where he received an M.F.A. in 1962. Despite his highly decorative academic  life  his experimental work  using the bauhaus theory had fell into Oblivion until now…

Reed was born in 1938. He had only recently graduated high school when the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling was announced (but still did not put an end to segregation in Charlottesville, instead resulting in Virginia Senator Henry Byrd’s “Massive Resistance” policy). Reed then experienced major culture shock after he graduated from Morgan State University, a historically Black college, and started pursuing his BFA at Yale. He grew up in a Black community in segregated Virginia, and his move to Connecticut meant that he, unlike African Americans who were born and raised in northern states, had to learn as an adult to navigate a seemingly integrated, but no less racist establishment. The studio became Reed’s safe haven for freedom to invent and play, and his geometric abstractions allowed him to explore color adventurously while simultaneously creating visual metaphors of his personal experiences. Reed’s paintings address his nimble navigation of a world in which color bore especially oppressive meanings, and they do so via a coded visual language in which colors represent institutions and locales through which he made his complicated way, from the segregation-era South into the halls of the Ivy League. And it was through the formal tools of abstraction he learned through his Bauhaus professors at Yale that provided Reed the visual language to “hide in plain sight.”  

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ACCOLADES

His work has been exhibited in America and Europe and has been included in group exhibits at

 The Whitney Museum inaugural exhibition “America Is Hard to See”, 

 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum

The Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 

The Yale University Art Gallery. 

His solo exhibits include: 

The Whitney Museum of American Art, 

The Bayly Museum in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

The Washburn Gallery in New York, the McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta and the Yale School of Art.

​The list goes on….

Reed also authored several intensive studio programs including ACRE, SIX-Summer in Experiment, and The Site Program. He was the founder and director of the Institute for Studio Studies, which was associated with the Yale Summer Session in Auvillar, France, from 2009 until his death in 2014. 

 Mr. Reed lectured extensively and taught at Skidmore College in 1964 and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he was head of the Foundation Studies Division. He was appointed to the Yale School of Art faculty in 1969 where he served for nearly 45 years as professor of painting/printmaking. He held several appointments as director of undergraduate studies in art at Yale starting in 1969 and also served as director of graduate studies in painting. From 1970 to 1975 he directed the art division of the Yale Summer School of Music and Art at Norfolk, Connecticut.

​Reed was a National Council of Arts . He was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a recipient of the 2004 National Council of Art Administrators Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association, and was elected in 2009 to the National Academy Fellows in New York. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He served as a board member for the McDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Silvermine Guild Center for the Arts, Second Street Gallery and the Lyme Academy of Art.

Reed received numerous awards including the National Council of Arts Administrators, the College Art Association’s Distinguished teaching award, the William DeVane teaching award,  National Academy Fellow and was a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.