Marcia Reed is an Milford artist, instructor, business owner, and resident. Owner of Gallery 37 on 8 South Walnut Street, you can find Marcia downtown supporting all local events, volunteering, making art, and showing off her two cats. Marcia will be a featured artist in the Herter Art Gallery From Sun to Cement, a juried exhibition of recent work by University of Massachusetts – Amherst alumni for the month of March.
Four jurors selected only fifteen people from all over the nation who received their Masters in Fine Arts from University of Massachusetts – Amherst. University of Massachusetts has a highly competitive fine arts program, accepting approximately six students a year to their Masters program. According to UMass, the program is a three year program in studio-based work and critical thinking. The jurors, Laylah Ali, Emma Chubb, Francis Christopher Oakley, and Ajay Sinha, all have impressive backgrounds. Laylah Ali is an Art Professor at Willliams College and winner of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Emma Chubb is the Director of Contemporary Art at Smith College and Curator Consultant for the Mathaf:Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar Francis. Christopher Oakley is an Art Professor at Yale and previous Interim Director of the Sterling & Francine Clark Museum. Ajay Sinha is the Chair of the Art Department and Art History instructor at Mt. Holyoke College. There will be a panel discussion and showcase of the art work beginning March 5th in Amherst, Massachusetts. Procheta Olson, Interim Director for the Department of Art at UMass stated “we received a large number of competitive submissions presenting a wide range of practices”.
You can see many of Marcia’s pieces in her gallery, Gallery 37: A Destination for Artful Living. You can also take a trip to Massachusetts to see her work on display. Marcia is very humbled by this award. She says “Of the Fifteen, eight of them were Professors in Art departments across the country and had resumes a mile long! One guy is a Professor of printmaking at the University in Toronto, Canada, all of them had galleries representing their work. One woman does huge installation sculptures all over the country. Then there was me! A little gallery owner in southern DE, who paints every night keeping to her vision!” Marcia has been painting for most of her life. She says “I know what keeps me engaged with painting. It is the ambiguity, exploration and the challenge of responding to all of nature and its shapes around me. It is the continuous complex interchange between expressing movement, shape, and line in nature and the tensions between them all. The natural shapes outdoors are my jumping off point. I find it exciting to interpret all these shapes in an expressive way.”
