Sandra J. Reed, Professor of Art, earned the BFA in Painting and Drawing from Drake University as a National Alumni Scholar and the MFA in Painting from The George Washington University as the first Morris Louis Fellow in Painting. Following twenty-one years at the Savannah College of Art & Design as a faculty member and administrator, Professor Reed joined the faculty at Marshall University as the Director of the School of Art and Design (2014-2018). She is an experienced collaborator and an avid mentor of student advancement. In addition to art courses, she designed a First-Year Seminar developed around daily curatorial activities as a paradigm of critical thinking, and currently teaches a Yeager seminar, Drawing and Visual Literacy. She has curated ambitious exhibition experiences for students as Special Topic and Independent Study courses and as co-curricular experiences. She has received a variety of university, state, and community funding for these visual art projects, projects related to healthy aging and the visual arts, and her personal creative research. These include an American Rescue Plan Individual Project, a Creative Aging and Lifelong Learning (CALL), and multiple Individual Professional Development grants from the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History. Most recently, she is one of three Primary Investigators for a community-based study of the impact of visual art activities on cognitive and other aspects of healthy aging funded by The Huntington Foundation and administered through the School of Medicine. In coordination with Professor Burnis Morris, she has chaired The Dr. Carter G. Woodson Lyceum’s Black History Month Poster Competition since 2016, has served as a Faculty Senator and on Faculty Senate committees, and regularly convenes College and School committees. Deeply committed to civic engagement, she has served on the Mayor’s Arts Council and the Huntington Area Convention and Visitors Bureau since her arrival in Huntington, among other community involvement. Beyond this region, her leadership has been seen within SECAC, a national non-profit organization comprised primarily of university art and art history professors, for which she served as its elected president from 2017-2020. Her award-winning paintings are held in numerous collections including the LaGrange Museum of Art, the Telfair Academy, and the United States Navy Memorial. She presented new work in two solo exhibitions in 2022, a selection displayed in the former Birke Art Gallery space in Smith Hall from April 15 through May 5, 2023. She was named a Distinguished Drinko Fellow in 2021.
Click here to view Professor Reed’s works of art
Click here to view ‘Conceptions of Flight’ Exhibit press release
Reed named Distinguished Drinko Fellow: https://www.marshall.edu/news/2022/04/13/marshall-drinko-fellow-sandra-reed-to-present-art-exhibit-at-south-charleston-campus/
Click to view the ‘Conceptions of Flight’ zine
The website, for the Selvage and Conceptions of Flight exhibitions, features online galleries of the exhibited artwork, audio recordings by the artists, and press releases from both exhibitions as well as the original exhibition essays by O’Malley and Peckham.
Mid-Prairie Alumni Awards: https://www.mphawksalumni.org/Alumni-Achievement-Awards
Weir Farm National Historical Park:
https://www.nps.gov/wefa/index.htm
Weir Farm Art Alliance (artist residency co-sponsor): https://www.weirfarmartalliance.org/
