Marcia Reed of Milford selected for juried exhibit in Massachusetts

Marcia Reed is an artist, instructor, business owner and Milford resident. She owns Gallery 37 on 8 South Walnut St., Milford, and can often be found downtown supporting local events, volunteering, making art, and showing off her two cats.

Reed will be a featured artist in the Herter Art Gallery show From Sun to Cement, a juried exhibition of recent work by University of Massachusetts - Amherst alumni for March.

Four jurors selected only 15 people from all over the nation who received their master in fine arts degrees from University of Massachusetts - Amherst. The university has a highly competitive fine arts program, accepting only about six students a year to its masters program. Procheta Olson, interim director for the art department at UMass, said, “We received a large number of competitive submissions presenting a wide range of practices.”

Many of Reed’s pieces can be seen in her gallery, Gallery 37: A Destination for Artful Living.

Reed said she is very humbled to be among those selected for the exhibit. “Of the 15, eight of them were professors in art departments across the country and had resumés a mile long. One guy is a professor of printmaking at the University of 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 Delaware who paints every night keeping to her vision,” she said.  

Reed has been painting for most of her life. She said, “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.”