Veda Reed

This interview with Veda Reed was recorded in the Memphis Listening Lab on June 29, 2022. Veda Reed is revered for her long career of creating sublime, luminous, large-scale paintings of skies, cloudscapes, and the cycles of the sun and moon. Inspired by her childhood in wide-open spaces of Oklahoma, her works represent moments of warmth and comfort experienced while witnessing nature. Working in isolation and silence, her studio practice reflects the flow of the atmospheres she depicts. She reduces images to their essential forms and then amplifies their presence through selective composition, brilliant palettes, and a painstaking process of layering pigment and glaze. Her incredibly smooth, seamless surfaces create perceptual effects ranging from a subtle, vibrating glow to pure radiance. For Reed, the act of painting is a spiritual journey toward truth and beauty and a celebration of cycles of renewal. Veda Reed has lived and worked in Memphis since 1952. She received a BFA from the Memphis College of Art and studied at Siena College in Memphis and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Amidst her long tenure as faculty member and dean at MCA, she has participated in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries across the U.S. and has received many awards and honors, including the 1996 Tennessee Governor’s Award in the Arts. The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art mounted a large-scale retrospective exhibition of her work in 2017. She is featured in the collections of Baker Donelson, Memphis; Boyle Investment Company, Memphis; Bracewell & Patterson, Washington, DC; First Tennessee Bank, Memphis; Independent Bank, Memphis; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Memphis Cancer Center, Memphis; Memphis College of Art, Memphis; Memphis University School, Memphis; Opryland Hotel, Nashville; Rhodes College, Memphis; Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; State University of New York at Binghampton, Binghampton, NY; The State of Tennessee Fine Arts Collection, Nashville; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson; and the Urban Arts Commission, Memphis, among others.