When gallery owner David Lusk met Veda Reed, he saw her as the “grand old woman of Memphis,” he says. “To call her the ‘grand old woman’ makes her sound older [than she was], but she had such an illustrious and important career to that point, she was famous.”
Reed was small in stature but could command a room with a quiet authority, especially in the classroom at the Memphis Academy of Arts, later the Memphis College of Art, where she taught painting, drawing, lettering, design, still life, and landscape painting for 34 years. Herself a 1956 graduate, she continued to support the school until its closure and encourage her students until her death in June 2025.
Over the course of her career, Reed was nationally renowned, her work having been displayed in galleries and museums all across the United States. Lusk began representing her in the ’90s.
For Reed, much of her art was dedicated to the prairies of her native Granite, Oklahoma — first landscapes, and then skyscapes — subjects, as she told Memphis Magazine in 2016, that gave her “a warm, safe feeling.”
She studied the sky, the clouds, read everything she could, and even joined the Cloud Appreciation Society. She was meticulous, too, in the way she painted, technical with a process of hand-cut stencils, rulers, layers of pigment that she wiped away and reapplied to capture the colors of the clouds bouncing and hiding light seemingly beyond the horizon.
And so, the clouds unfold on the canvas dramatically, yet seamlessly, almost in a “broad panorama-like CinemaScope,” Lusk says. “I frequently find her pieces to have a cinematic viewpoint.”
Reed painted all the way through to the end. For her 90th birthday in 2024, Lusk hosted a show, her last show, of new works. “People from far and wide — we had some from down in South Louisiana — came up for the show, and we had folks in from the Minneapolis area,” Lusk says. Asked what brought people out to see her show from hundreds of miles away, Lusk says, “I think it’s that authority from which she spoke, her feeling about art and her ability to say what she really firmly believed, that really worked well or didn’t work so well.”
Over the summer, the gallerist began archiving her work, going through her studio and uncovering all that Reed left behind. “It feels like another beautiful life,” he says. Reed’s output was prolific, he adds. “I’m gonna miss not having a new body of work for her every two or three years — I liked what she made and I liked seeing her new ideas.”
For January, in honor of her birthday once again, Lusk has planned a show in memory of Reed, featuring works that date from 1960 to 2022. The show opens Friday, January 2nd.
“In Memoriam,” David Lusk Gallery, 97 Tillman, on display January 2-February 7.
Opening, Friday, January 2, 5-7 p.m.
Virtual Tour, Tuesday, January 6, 12:30 p.m.