Two members of the faculty of the Yale School of Art have recently been honored with distinguished awards.
Robert Reed received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award at the annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) held in Seattle this February. Peter Halley has been named winner of the “Larry” Award for support of contemporary art by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Reed joined the painting faculty at Yale in 1969. In addition to his distinguished career as an educator, Reed is a celebrated artist whose work has been featured at exhibitions across the country and Europe. The Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a solo exhibition of Reed’s work, and his paintings are in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney.
Reed lectures widely, and has taught at Skidmore College and Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He holds bachelor’s degrees from Morgan State College and Yale, and earned his Master’s in Fine Arts degree at Yale. The Minneapolis College of Art and Design awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2001. Reed is currently the director of undergraduate studies at Yale and continues to teach painting both at the undergraduate and the graduate level.
In presenting the teaching award to Reed, the Award Committee cited the impressive number of past students who had come forth to share their memories of him. “Numerous former students, many now faculty members at important institutions…wrote of how Reed changed their lives and influenced their own teaching practices, with energy, vigor, enthusiasm, generosity and passion,” noted the citation that accompanied the award.
The citation concludes,”[H]e is a teacher who rejects the notions of hierarchy between student and teacher, and at a school known nationally for its graduate program, distinguishes himself with his commitment to undergraduate education in art.”
Reed is the fourth Yale faculty member to win the CCA Teaching Award. He follows Josef Albers, who won in 1965; Bernard Chaet, in 1986; and Andrew Forge, in 1988.
Acclaimed as painter, installation-artist, writer and publisher, Halley joined the Yale faculty in 1999. The artist received his bachelor’s degree in art history from Yale and a master’s in painting from the University of New Orleans. His internationally recognized work includes paintings, prints and installations combining media such as prints, diagrams and fiberglass reliefs. He has exhibited widely, most notably in recent solo exhibitions at the Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam, the Reina Sofia Museo Nacional Centro Arte in Madrid, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, France, the Kitakyushu Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, the Des Moines Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. His prints were featured in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Halley, who has also taught at Columbia and UCLA, is a commended critic as well as educator. His published writings include two collections of essays, and in 2000 he received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism. Since 1996 he has been the publisher of the arts and entertainment magazine “index.”
The letter informing Halley of his award cites his “long-standing dedication to the arts as an influential painter, publisher, critic and educator,” and notes that his “vision over the past two decades has significantly impacted visual culture on an international scale.”
Halley is a native New Yorker and makes the city his home. An interactive web project Halley created for the Museum of Modern Art can be accessed online at http://www.moma.org/onlineprojects/Halley/explodingcell.html.
An exhibition of his new paintings will be at Mary Boone Gallery in New York from April 29 to June 26.
Named in honor of Aldrich Museum founder Larry Aldrich, the “Larry” award is given to philanthropists, corporations, government officials and individuals who have made leading contributions in support of contemporary art. The award will be given to Halley on June 12 at an inaugural gala for the reopening of the Aldrich Museum following an ambitious expansion.
