Kristin Reed's work explores consciousness and compassion for the Earth and all her beings. Reed seeks a deeper inner knowledge while existing in a disconnected media age. She is fascinated by the farthest reaches of distant galaxies and how the tiniest particles and waves in the natural world are distilled by science into mathematics. Everything is energy. Reed is awed at the discovery by quantum physicists that "consciousness is the ground of all being," returning full circle to the knowledge of ancient cultures who believed the same. Her investigation of these sources of inspiration appears in her work through expressionistic light, luminous color, violently splattered and softly sprayed paint, liquid drips, photo transfers, and collaged flotsam and jetsam of our daily reality, including images and portions of text and typography. Reed's paintings juxtapose geometric symbols found in ancient cultures—the sacred geometries of circles—with current advanced physics, mysticism, dream, and meditation space. In her work, she recognizes an inner reality within a vast enveloping cosmic reality, where the wild and chaotic balance with serenity and peace.

Reed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. In the 1980s, she made street art (click here to view) with stencils, posters, and billboards and directed a project for MTA's Creative Stations to create a gallery space within the Bleeker Street Subway station. Reed painted several large public murals (click here to view) in NYC, Long Island, Erie, PA, and Nicaragua. Her paintings traveled for three years to major US museums with The Smithsonian Institute's Traveling Exhibition program (SITES) in an exhibition entitled "The Realm of the Coin." One of her street billboards was shown at The DIA Foundation in SOHO in a project by Martha Rosler, then more recently in The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and Mitchell-Inness and Nash Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.

Reed currently has a studio residency with Chashama.org in the Space To Create program at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. She is a Reiki Master and Teacher who practices and teaches hands-on energy healing. Reed works with a group that exchanges knowledge with indigenous Maya and Amazonian populations, training them to run their own acupuncture and Reiki clinics. She has trained an autonomous group of Mayan women in the mountains of Guatemala to the Master level of Reiki. Now these women use Reiki to heal and train their own community. Her work as a healer has dramatically affected her painting.

Excerpt from a review for "Presences of Mind" May 2016 by Charles Frederick:

"Reed's canvases deploy exquisitely precise sacred geometries of circles (some of this knowledge in historical retrieval) and exact linear intersections, clear guardians awaiting acceptance. These lines and two-dimensioned underlying and overlying geometries offer routes through ecstasy and the pilgrim's healing journey, connected and broken over a series of paintings, often almost a mysteriously drawn appearance on sensually arresting fields of color, windswept apart and towards one another, in a paradox of interruption by separation of canvases, while appearing as though they don't end, in a continuity of eternity, and are following through in a universe beyond (for example) a triptych of paintings where they appear. Cosmic wind, the perceptible sensual, vividly mundane experience, order discerned, textures, tactile representation, sometimes small texts in completely unexpected insistent appearance, also (everything) growing out of, or already "squarely" positioned in this mysterious but rational cosmos we will learn to trust, and which we can see, once portrayed in such sensual form, the flat geometries responsible for such volumes of depth".