Reggie Burrows Hodges
Reggie Burrows Hodges (b. 1965, Compton, CA) is a painter whose works explore storytelling and visual metaphor. Hodges’ works uncover universal subjects such as identity, community, truth, and memory, and often draw inspiration from his childhood in Compton. Starting from a black ground, he develops the scene around his figures with painterly, foggy brushwork, playing with how perception is affected when the descriptive focus is placed not on human agents but on their surroundings. Figures materialize in recessive space, stripped of physical identifiers. Bodies are described by their painted context, highlighting Hodges’ embrace of tenuous ambiguities and his close observation of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Their quiet haziness, developed with the soft touch of Hodges’ hand, probes the imprecision of memory and examines the possibility that we are all products of our environment. Hodges studied theatre and film at the University of Kansas.
His work is held in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, among others.
Hodges is a 2020 recipient of the annual Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. As the 2019 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Hodges will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine, in 2022.