Cathy Braasch, Innovator in Residence
Architecture, Visual Art
This symposium celebrates the life and work of the painter and educator Robert Reed. He was a prolific artist and taught at Yale University for almost 50 years, the only African American professor ever tenured by the School of Art. There is remarkably little documentation of his career, but the intangible influence of his work is enormous. There is a need to make visible his impact on pedagogy, art, & design to honor him and to share his work & his ideas with other students, teachers, and artists. The structure of the symposium will center on drawing workshops for students. These sessions will be interspersed with lectures and panels on key topics related to Robert Reed’s teaching and painting. There will be a concurrent exhibition of his work as well as the student work produced during the workshops. The schedule includes a three day symposium hosted at Penn State and a subsequent one day event in New York City hosted by Hunter College & the Whitney Museum of American Art. The primary goal of the event is to honor the impact of Robert Reed’s career. In honoring him, we hope to make his paintings and pedagogical insights accessible to a larger audience and to initiate a record of those achievements. We also hope that the discussions and exhibitions will lay a groundwork for further documentation, curation, and scholarship on his work and surrounding topics. And it just wouldn’t be right if we didn’t make a lot of drawings in the process.