SK Reed

SK Reed (they/them) is an artist living in Kansas City, KS. Reed received a BSE in Arts Education and BFA in Painting from The University of Central Missouri in 2014 and a MA from Eastern Illinois University in 2020. They have continued their education taking courses with NYC Crit Club, New York Studio School, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They received their MFA at The University of Kansas in May of 2023. Reed has attended residencies and workshops at Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch, Awagami Paper Factory, MI-LAB International Mokuhanga Laboratory, and was a Wingate University Fellow at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. They have exhibited regionally at Leedy-Voulkos, Curiouser & Curiouser, and the Kansas City Artists Coalition and nationally at Ground Floor Gallery in Nashville and AUTOMAT in Philadelphia. Currently, Reed curates for Beco Gallery in Kansas City. They are a co-founder of Peer2Peer (P2P), a curatorial group of five artists located throughout the US and Canada. Additionally, Reed is the founder of Alt U, an evolving space for building community around learning, acting as an infrequent book club.

In Reed’s work, fluid and Sci-Fi “Creatures” engage with and learn from their non-human companions. Reed looks to all the animate species surrounding them for relief from the intensely gendered and capitalist present. Living between Kansas and Missouri, they speak to the lost and critical connections between their body and the local environment. Spending time outside, they realize a greater kin they have been neglecting: the birds, water, animals, and plants that also call this place home. Using painting, ceramic, and installation practices Reed imagines a world where bodies are more than their physicalities and the wisdom of the more-than-human beings we share this world with are prioritized over profit.

SK Reed’s figurative paintings and sculptures challenge rigid notions of gender. Reed explores the strangeness associated with being a Queer body, the difference between the liberation felt within oneself and the ways they feel their body is perceived by others. They embrace the fact that over fifty percent of the body is water and enjoy thinking about all the tiny, symbiotic organisms that share a home on and in the body. While the flesh is often seen as a boundary for where bodies begin and end, Reed’s paintings often feature watery paint that spills over these edges. The paintings embrace fluidity, a body seeping into and becoming part of its environment.

Reed’s ceramics speak to a different reality, the felt edge, a solid form in three-dimensional space. These figurative forms are covered in wild medicinal plants of the prairie, species which have healing properties. The plants and figures provide protection and restoration towards one another. Ceramics are inherently more fragile, like a body in space. The plants and figures work together, plants providing coverage and stamina to the body; the body recognizing their importance, carrying them forward.

In “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” adrienne maree brown writes, “What you pay attention to grows.” Additionally, she shares Toni Cade Bambara’s inspirational words, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” These sentiments fuel Reed’s current work, envisioning new ways forward in this often-harrowing world by paying close attention to how other species are surviving. Creatures engage with the more-than-human world as guides and teachers to counter ways of being.