A CONVERSATION WITH THE HUNTINGTON MUSEUM OF ART CHRIS HATTEN
BRIAN MICHAEL REED A SOLO EXHIBITION
JANUARY 21ST / 2PM -4PM
JANUARY 16TH - FEBRUARY 16TH Huntington Museum of Art | 2033 McCoy RD, Huntington, WV 25701
brianmichaelreed.com | www.hmoa.org
STUDIOS
HMOA
Brian Michael Reed grew up in Clay County, West Virginia, as part of a family whose roots span many generations in the state. The inspirations for many of his works originate from his love of the natural world. The stories in each collection of works contain a cross cultural self-portrait, chronicling his curiosities to understand history, myth and the symbolisms that cultures create to understand and express themselves. As a boy his wanderlust was constrained to the woods and creeks of his family’s farm in the small town of Ivydale with only the images in his National Geographic collection to help guide his dreams on understanding the wider world. Maturing, he has made his dreams manifest by creating works and exhibitions based on experiences from living in different regions of the world and recording thoughts and observations from his daily life. Brian is a pictorial anthropologist, through his art, we share in the stories of a young West Virginia artist whose fresh pair of eyes have distilled meaningful experiences from around the globe into the art on exhibition here today. Reed, in fact, draws his creative energy from the wide variety of cultural experiences he has absorbed, and his artwork serves as a reflection of the cornucopia of customs, folklore, religion and mythology he has encountered in his travels and studies. Universal themes of love, loss, tragedy, memory, death and the afterlife are all part of his work. Much of the emotion expressed in his paintings and sculpture comes from the vicissitudes he has experienced in his own life, such as the tragic loss of his father in an automobile accident when he was 17 and a debilitating injury in his early twenties that left him partially paralyzed and immobile for more than a year. Reed first came to Huntington in summer of 2000, participating at the Governor’s School for the Arts held at Marshall University. He was continuously mentored by pastel and landscape artist Sandra King and after graduating from Clay County High School, was encouraged to enroll and attend art school at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he studied painting. While there, artists and scholars such as James Crable and David Ehrenpreis opened up the
gates to new ways of thinking so that he began to utilize his talents to “create from my imagination” and invent works that were “more than scenes I could see in life.” In the months after his accident and paralysis, Reed passed the time by studying the cultures of distant lands, especially Inca, Aztec and West African societies. This exploration helped him identify the common threads that are found in all cultures and would lay the foundation for the themes he would explore in his later work. After a grueling but ultimately successful rehabilitation, he moved to New York City, where he worked his way into the gallery scene with his paintings and installations. He simultaneously attended graduate school at Yale University, commuting to classes with pre-Columbian scholar Mary Miller and African art scholar Robert Ferris Thompson. The spark that had been kindled with his cultural studies not only expressed itself in his work, but it ignited a wanderlust that would take him on several extended journeys to places such as Mexico, the Caribbean to China and Japan. He has been presented with many opportunities to exhibit his works nationally as well as internationally, most recently in China and Japan. Reed maintains a vigorous schedule of artist residencies, guest speaking, exhibitions and studio art production full time and continues to empower and interpret people’s thoughts, feelings, and everyday events through his art. Reed was invited to explore the collection of the Huntington Museum of Art and make a selection of objects that paralleled themes expressed in his work. His picks from the HMA collection include many luminaries in the field of modern art, including Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Chuck Close, Cy Twombly, Kiki Smith, Jim Dine, Richard Tuttle, and Keith Haring. Reed’s colorful works hold their own in the gallery, and are impressive in terms of both quantity and scale. The largest of the works, Lotus Memories, which is themed around meditation to hold onto memories while having reflective time spent viewing a lotus pond in China, spans a distance of over fifty feet in length. Reed will return to the museum in 2018 for a second part of the project, when he will install his work alongside the museum’s extensive collection of paintings from Haiti.