This spring, to celebrate the centennial of the California College of the Arts, psyche: R&R brings together recent works on paper by CCA graduates Laurie Reid and Mark A. Rodriguez in the museum's stairwell gallery. Reid's Caresses, a new series of drawings in which she held a group of colored pencils in her hands and let her energy guide gentle movements across the page, is presented alongside earlier watercolors from the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Reid's watercolors have evolved from traditional subject matter-still lifes of fruit-toward more abstract imagery. Her process explores the way in which, as she once said, “water, atmosphere, gravity, paper, and pigment intersect with each other and the artist.” Rodriguez's photograph psyche displacement, a riff on Robert Smithson's displaced mirror works of the late 1960s, accompanies a group of drawings including the series Meditation (on a Telephone). Informed by architecture, Rodriguez's clean-lined perspectival drawings document his sculptural ideas in two-dimensional form. Reid, who received her MFA at CCA in 1996, was awarded the prestigious SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Her work was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She lives and works in Berkeley. Rodriguez earned his MFA at CCA in 2006, and was awarded the Barclay Simpson MFA Award that same year. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
