Arts Dean
Dennis Reed by Phillip Highley, 2010
As the Dean of Fine, Performing & Media Arts at Valley College, I appreciate your interest in the arts. I invite you to enroll in one of our many courses and to attend one of our numerous arts performances or Art Gallery exhibitions, all of which are open to the public.
You may contact me by emailing reeddj@lavc.edu
or by writing to:
Dennis Reed, Dean
Fine, Performing & Media Arts
Los Angeles Valley College
5800 Fulton Avenue
Valley Glen, CA 91401
Curves by Hiromu Kira, c. 1930Collection of Dennis Reed
Biography
Dennis Reed is best known for having recovered the lost work of an entire community of photographic artists. The result was an exhibition and catalogue, Japanese Photography in America, 1920-1940, which the Getty Museum has described as “groundbreaking.” The exhibition traveled to such museums as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Oakland Museum, Oakland California, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
He is also co-author of Pictorialism in California: Photographs, 1900-1940, published jointly by the J. Paul Getty Museum & The Huntington Library. Among his essays are Hy Hirsh: Experiments in Filmmaking and Photography, published by Paul Hertzmann, Inc. in 2007, The Wind Came from the East: Asian American Photography, published by Stanford University in the fall of 2008, and Sweet and Sour: Photographs of Charles Wong, published by Velvet Lens Cap in 2009.
He has lectured at the De Young Museum, The Huntington Library, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Japanese American National Museum, the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Boston University, and The Henry Art Gallery, among others. He has appeared on NPR four times, including the program, The Story, in 2010. He has also appeared in the art biography, Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray, an award-winning documentary produced by the Japanese American National Museum. An interview with Reed was published in Art on Paper magazine (January-February 2008 issue).
He has won national design awards, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ 50 Best Books and the Art Museum Associations Award of Excellence. He remains a practicing artist, photographer and designer.
For some thirty years he has collected art, mainly photographs. Selections from his collection have been shown in such exhibitions as Made in California, 101 Years of California Photography, The History of Women Photographers, and After the Photo-Secession, among others. Institutions showing his collection include: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Huntington, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Oakland Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Crocker Museum of Art, Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Boston University, and Cornell University, The Henry Art Gallery, among others. Lost & Found, Photographs from the Dennis Reed Collection, was mounted by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2006.
He is Dean and Professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley College. He is currently the Chair Emeritus of the Photographic Arts Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.