Rain Over Crow Butte, Ft. Robinson, Neb, 1994, oil on canvas, 28x36”
Carroll Todd has never forgotten his first class at the Memphis Academy of Arts in 1972. It was two-dimensional design with Veda Reed, a woman small in stature but intimidating nonetheless. “I was so nervous,” he says.
For their first assignment, Reed gave each student a word to express in a drawing. Todd’s was “suspension.” “I struggled and ended up drawing a fat man suspended by one of his suspenders,” he says. “I worked and worked on that drawing and even with all my mediocre attempts, she taught me with grace. During critique she kindly expressed the successful aspects of my labor.”
Reed, who passed away in June 2025, went on to encourage Todd and many other students like him throughout their careers. She knew good art when she saw it. “She didn’t suffer fools very well at all,” says David Lusk, who represented her since the ’90s at his gallery, “and she would very easily say that this painting is not very good, or this exhibition is not very good — both about herself and about other people.”
When Lusk met Reed, he saw her as the “grand old woman of Memphis,” he says. He admits that makes her seem older than she actually was, “but she had such an illustrious and important career.”
Spoleto, 1962, oil on canvas, 42x50”
Over the course of that long career, Reed was nationally renowned, her work displayed in galleries and museums across the United States. The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art houses 12 of her pieces in its permanent collection and hosted three solo exhibitions of her work: “Veda Reed: Houses and Things” in 1967, “Veda Reed: Paintings and Drawings 1955-1980” in 1980, and “Veda Reed: Day into Night” in 2016.
This month, Reed’s work will be featured in a show at David Lusk Gallery memorializing her, and in February, she will feature in a group exhibit at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art dedicated to the artists of Memphis College of Art.
For Reed, much of her art was dedicated to the prairies of her native Granite, Oklahoma — first landscapes, then skycapes — subjects she told Memphis Magazine in 2016 (“Young at Art,” by Shara Clark) that gave her “a warm, safe feeling.”
Untitled temple with star, c1960, oil on paper, 8x5”
She’d travel between Granite and Memphis and bring back inspiration, but eventually, when the traveling became too much, she painted the clouds from her Memphis backyard. The resulting works were less expansive but more intimate, she realized.
“I don’t intend to give up the sky,” she told Clark, “but I’ve got to put it in a new place.” At an artist talk for a 2019 show at David Lusk Gallery, she said, “It was quite beautiful. It was just smaller.”
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, and layers of pigment that she wiped away and reapplied to capture the colors of the clouds bouncing and hiding light seemingly beyond the horizon.
“Especially when I started painting the sky more so than the land, I began to want a very particular kind of surface, one that had no brush marks, one that could be defined as air,” she said. “In the sunrise and the sunset — that’s what I was concentrating on when I began to think in these terms — I couldn’t paint the sky and then paint the sun over it. I couldn’t even paint them one at a time and edge to edge because I wanted the color to appear to come from beneath the cloud or the sky.”
And so, the clouds hang 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 was never afraid to move beyond simple reality in favor of something more atmospheric, more luminous. “She said not to worry about realism,” Todd says of their time in the classroom. “It’s about the expressive qualities of line.”
The story goes that Reed moved to Memphis from Oklahoma in 1952 to stay with her father, a pipeliner who worked for natural gas companies across the country. New to the city, and with nothing else to do, she drove around town before coming across a Victorian mansion on Adams Avenue that then housed the art academy. She walked inside and emerged having registered for the fall semester. She hadn’t even been asked to prove her talent; at that point, she had taken only one drawing class at the behest of her aunt, who painted watercolors. “I promised [the registrar] that my father would write a check,” she said, “and he did, but he took away my driving privileges.”
Reed graduated in 1956. After travels through New York and England, she returned to the school in 1961, this time as a teacher of painting, drawing, lettering, design, still life, and landscape painting. The academy moved to a modern campus in Overton Park and changed its name to Memphis College of Art, and Reed continued to teach there for 34 years, retiring in 1995.
“When I catch myself looking at the sky into the clouds, I often think of Veda and say, ‘Wow, that’s a perfect Veda Reed sky.’” — Carroll Todd
Reed would later reflect, “Anybody can learn how to paint. It’s a skill that you can develop — the creative part is in addition to learning the skill, and sometimes that part can’t really be taught in the same way the skill can. But people should never give up trying to make something. Creating something is really the most wonderful thing one can do.”
Reed herself painted all the way through to the end. For her 90th birthday in 2024, Lusk hosted a show, her last, of new works. Marina Pacini, former chief curator for the Brooks, facilitated a conversation at the opening. The two had previously worked together for Reed’s 2016 exhibition at the Brooks.
“As she was nervous about [the 2024 talk], we practiced,” Pacini says. “That evening she was phenomenal. I was worried she’d get tired, and asked her if she was ready to go after a good 20 minutes talking to friends and fans following the talk. I had to laugh when she told me to get lost.”
“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 adds. Asked what brought people to 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 worked well or didn’t work so well.”
There was a certain gravitas to Veda,” concurs Remy Miller, former dean of MCA, who worked alongside Reed. “She was very calm, but very firm, and she believed in the college, and she had been there long enough and was well known enough that people took what she said very seriously. But she was definitely a quiet type of leader. … She could be intimidating, but down deep, she was very, very sweet. She was so kind to me.”
Taos Mountain Sky: 6-26-97, 1998, oil on canvas, 36x51”
After Reed retired from the school in 1995, she and Miller stayed connected. “She continued to work on the board and so she was super supportive and extremely helpful,” he says. She even taught classes here and there, and encouraged her colleagues and students well after they graduated, filling her home with their works. In Miller’s case, they traded pieces. “Even after the college closed [in 2020], we just kept right on going,” he says.
And she kept going. “Veda continued to develop and grow into her later years. And it is not common that painters get better with age,” Miller says. “[Her paintings] became more abstract and more beautiful in their color.”
Pacini agrees, adding, “Her paintings continued to get better and better over the course of her career. Her late works are luminous celebrations of the beauty of nature. People who look at her paintings are transformed and see the sky in an entirely different way. I’m speaking from personal experience. I couldn’t possibly calculate how often I look at the clouds and think of her, which keeps her close.”
Over the summer, Lusk began archiving her work, going through her studio and uncovering all that Reed left behind. “It feels like another beautiful life,” he says. “She was very private in many ways, but she kept a lot of stuff — good notes, writings and letters, and a bunch of show cards. So the archives itself will be really awesome to have collected somewhere.”
Yet Lusk knew her to be an eliminator rather than a keeper. “She was the best editor of herself of any artist,” he says. “She would destroy more than she kept.” Even so, Reed’s output was prolific. “I’m going to miss not having a new body of work from her every two or three years — I liked what she made and I liked seeing her new ideas.”
For January, in honor once again of her birthday, Lusk has planned a show in memory of Reed, called simply “In Memoriam,” featuring works from her estate. From February through September, her work will also be featured in an exhibit at Brooks: “Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy,” which Pacini, the museum’s former chief curator, helped organize to celebrate and remember the school’s legacy in Memphis.
“To find artists to consider for the exhibition, I developed a questionnaire asking graduates who important mentors were,” Pacini says. “Not surprisingly, Veda was mentioned innumerable times. The exhibition pairs faculty and students, and she was thrilled to be hanging next to James Little [who graduated in 1974]. To this day, James acknowledges Veda’s importance to his practice.”
“Veda’s legacy can be seen all over the world and especially Memphis because of the students she encouraged and enabled to attend the college,” says Christine Todd, Carroll Todd’s wife and director of admissions for seven years at MCA. Reed, along with artists like Dolph Smith and John McIntyre, helped select artists for scholarships at the school. “She was an inspirational teacher and artist,” Christine says.
“When I catch myself looking at the sky into the clouds,” Carroll says, “I often think of Veda and say, ‘Wow, that’s a perfect Veda Reed sky.’”
“In Memoriam” will be on display at David Lusk Gallery in January, and “Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy” opens at Brooks in February.
