Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Website: lauriereid.com
Laurie Reid was born in 1964 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Eugene, Oregon. She studied French literature at Reed College in Portland before turning to visual art, earning her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1996. She moved to San Francisco in 1989 and has since made the Bay Area her home, maintaining studios in Berkeley and Oakland.
Reid came to prominence in the late 1990s, winning the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, which led to a solo exhibition at SFMOMA in 1999. The following year, her work was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Earlier in her career she received the Cadogan Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation in 1995. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and served as a Studio Advisor in the Graduate Fine Arts program at the California College of the Arts.
Reid’s work has entered the permanent collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is represented by Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York.
Reid is best known for her large-scale watercolors, which can extend from five to sixteen feet in length, as well as smaller oil paintings on linen and a sustained engagement with printmaking. Her practice is built around a deliberate relinquishment of control: she allows gravity and the natural properties of water and pigment to shape the surface, embracing chance, drips, and the warp of wet paper as compositional elements rather than errors to correct. She has described her approach as one that holds that “there’s always the human hand involved,” even when working within grids or other formal structures.
Her work tends toward the minimal and abstract, exploring the full spectrum of watercolor’s behavior—from opacity to translucency, from pooled washes to near-bare paper. She has collaborated with Crown Point Press in San Francisco on a series of etchings using spit bite and soap ground aquatint techniques, and with poet Barbara Guest on the artist’s book Symbiosis (2000). Recurring bodies of work include monoprints and small-scale oil paintings that privilege intimate scale and close material attention.
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