A compelling mix of ecology, queerness, anti-capitalist sentiment and abstraction animates the Kansas City artist’s work
Artist and curator SK Reed is a versatile creative force who blends an old-school art ethos with contemporary sensibilities. Hailing from Lake Lotawana, Missouri, Reed has crafted a distinctive and potent identity as a painter, ceramicist, curator and educator, mixing ecology, queerness, anti-capitalist sentiment and abstraction into a compelling body of otherworldly work.
Reed went all in on art and academia, committing to art not just as a passion or profession but as a kind of sacramental vocation and platform for comprehensive societal discourse and discussion. They earned a BSE in art education and a BFA in painting from the University of Central Missouri in 2014.
“I took five years off between undergrad and graduate school just trying to be a person and an artist,” said Reed, who left Missouri after undergraduate work to move to New York City. In addition to teaching art and various odd jobs, the stay in NYC resulted in a community mural in Brooklyn with a local school district, a testament to Reed’s inner educator and an outgrowth of their characteristic kindness and humane approach to life and art.
Upon returning to Kansas City, Reed continued to expand upon their initial creative footprint, and their academic background grew to include the New York City Crit Club, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the New York Studio School. Reed worked as a substitute teacher in Kansas City Public Schools and made art in a studio above their parents’ garage. Eventually, Reed earned an MA in art at Eastern Illinois University and an MFA in painting from the University of Kansas, both with highest honors.
“Night Grasses,” one of Reed’s larger-scale paintings, is an acrylic-meets-ceramic installation hybrid. It exemplifies their mythical vision with a deep, sealike bluish acrylic background on large-scale canvas fermented with an abstract foreground. Geometric flourishes are layered with finer brushwork, and unusually beautiful handlike shapes jut out of the top and sides of the canvas. Bringing to art a new definition of organism, “Night Grasses” rearticulates the idea of what sentience entails — the paintings become alienlike lifeforms interacting with their complementary ceramic counterparts, observing each other as nature, art, audience and life itself do. Life and art for Reed involve nature observing animated versions of itself, and Reed threads that tricky needle in both two- and three-dimensional work brilliantly.
“I like the presence of something confronting you on the same scale as your body,” Reed said in a recent interview. “There’s also just in the making of it, so much more activity like you’re moving with it.” The titles of Reed’s work draw from diverse antecedents, including Chris Ofili, Sam Gilliam, Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Wangechi Mutu. In “Symbiosis,” they merge abstraction with syncretic and titillatingly interactive counterparts to facilitate awareness of varying forms of sentience — between audience and spectacle, between life and living, between alienation and liberation.
Reed uses water “as a metaphor for identity and fluidity.” Portions of their work present like transient, all-encompassing Rorschach tests embedded with an infinite set of ideas, images, languages, meanings and relationships, which often, they said, involve “other bodies, animals and nature that people might otherwise neglect.” Reed’s fascination with abstraction and spatial dynamics also informs some of their installation work, where every element becomes incarnate. “(I’m) thinking about space and movement through time,” Reed said, “these sci-fi bodies and relationships in space. I like experimenting with the borderline of abstraction with space.”
Reed is currently curator at Beco Gallery. Their resume boasts an impressive list of residencies and workshops, including stints at the Vermont Studio Center and Japan’s MI-LAB International Mokuhanga Laboratory, and an exhibition history that includes shows at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, Vulpes Bastille, The Smalter Gallery, and Curiouser & Curiouser, as well as in Warrensburg, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago and Brooklyn.
Beginning in 2023, Reed became a lecturer in Foundations at The Kansas City Art Institute, where they will continue to teach in 2024. They remain committed to their expansive artistic and educational projects and theory-laden sorties. Reed’s inventive and idiosyncratic work installs momentum, imagination and interaction in an increasingly alienated world.
Reed will have solo exhibitions at United Colors in October/November 2024 and at Plug Gallery in March 2025. For more information, visit sk-reed.com and Instagram @sk__paints.
