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About Robert R. Reid

A fifth generation Canadian (b. 1927), Robert R. Reid, at age fourteen, taught himself to operate a "hand press" — following his absorbing interest in letterpress printing.

In 1950s Vancouver, in close association with artists/architects/designers (as well as editors for magazines and journals) his experimental practice was consistently emblematic of a post-WWII "Allied Arts" Movement in Canada. 

In 1949, in an intruduction to the first private-press book printed in Canada — his edition of Alfred Waddington's The Fraser Mines Vindicated (1858) — Reid remarks: "Fine books have literary value ... but it is their value as works of art which distinguishes them from other books." In 1962, he became the first "design practitioner" to be awarded a Canada Council Visual Arts Award.

Having taught printing and graphic design at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design), from 1957 to 1962, Reid moved to Montreal, where he functioned as Director of Design and Production for McGill University Press. Subsequently, before returning to Vancouver in 1997, he was active as a publisher in New York for 23 years.

Robert R. Reid's current practice sustains a digital-experimental typographer's teleportation presence — and a mindful/regenerative global village aesthetic. In that regard, the present exhibition presents an assemblage of documents generated since 2012. Components of the present exhibition will be intermittently updated in order to maximize the scope of an exploratory curatorial initiative.

About Robert R. Reid