Biography: Paul Reed

PAUL REED (American, b. 1919)

Washington, D.C., native Paul Reed, in 1965-1966 was with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis among the six painters in The Washington Color Painters, the first nationally traveling Washington Color Field exhibition. Reed has experimented with media and techniques throughout his career. After an Abstract Expressionist period, Reed in 1959 began staining canvasses using water-based acrylics, then a recent invention. Over the next five decades, he also created metal sculpture and photographic collages. He made pastel drawings and shaped canvases, some of them directly nailed to the wall. He also produced gouache paintings done on plexiglass and transferred to paper. Reed’s work is in dozens of museums across the country, including the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, all in D.C., the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. In South Carolina, his work is in the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Columbia Museum of Art.