Harry Reuben Reynolds was born to Alex and Dora Reynolds on January 29, 1898. In 1923 he joined the art staff at Utah State Agricultural College. He spent the next forty-seven years with the University teaching a variety of classes such as photography, history of art, painting, art education, jewelry, crafts, and design. Over time, however, he focused on photography and experimentation with color photography.

Reynolds's service to the University extended beyond his teaching load. He was an advisor for the Buzzer student yearbook and he served as the first USU Art Gallery Curator (now the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art) in 1967. Reynolds tirelessly promoted art appreciation and education throughout Utah through exhibitions, lectures, and serving on numerous committees. Professor Reynolds died on March 10, 1974 in Logan.

The exhibit “Harry Reuben Reynolds: Responsive Observer” featured a selection of 24 photos and paintings by Reynolds. They were loaned for the exhibition from the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. They were on display in the lobby of the Merrill-Cazier Library from November 23, 2015 to January 22, 2016.

Introductory exhibit text panel

- Text from the Introductory Panel -

Painter, Photographer and former Utah State University Professor Harry Reuben Reynolds (1898 –1974) is among Utah’s treasured artists and art advocates. His legacy as an educator includes forty-three years of service as a faculty member in the Art Department, founder of USU’s Photography program, and recipient of the Utah Art Education Association’s 1960 “Distinguished Service Award." Reynolds’ influence extends beyond academia with notable statewide arts advocacy that includes service as Chairman for the State of Utah’s Days of ‘47 Centennial Celebration Committee, and successfully introducing the notable exhibition 100 Years of American Painting, featuring works from New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of Art, at the Utah Centennial Exposition. Through his dedicated service, both on USU’s campus and throughout the state, Reynolds helped facilitate for others the same curiosity and appreciation that was at the core of his artistic practice.

This selection from the permanent collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University presents Reynolds’ paintings and photographs of the regional landscape and surrounding campus. The juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate creative processes demonstrate that, whether captured on film or rendered on canvas, Reynolds was a responsive observer whose works reveal an acute attunement to the relationship between the fluctuating natural world and the built environment.

Reynolds’ career began at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied under American Regionalist painter Grant Wood, who later gained renown for his iconic work American Gothic. American Regionalism, also known as American Scene Painting, emerged in the 1920s and 1930s and is largely associated with artists of the mid-western United States. The style is typified by a blend of abstraction and realism employed to depict the rural scenery of the often-romanticized American Heartland. After graduating in 1923, Reynolds brought the style to Cache Valley where he relocated upon accepting a position in the Art Department of what was then Utah State Agricultural College. The Regionalist influence is apparent in Reynolds’ stylized depictions of Cache Valley scenery, as seen in the example of a painting entitled Looking South (c. 1930). In this work Reynolds’ use of color, coupled with the softened geometry of the trees and buildings, conveys both season and mood and is congruent with the blended abstract-realist style the artist helped popularize in the region.

Though Reynolds’ primary mode of expression shifted from painting to photography, the artist applied a similarly Regionalist gaze to his photographic subjects. The subtle abstractions employed in Reynolds’ paintings are achieved in his photography through angled vantage points and the intervention of the changing seasons. In two photographs of the southbound view of Sardine Canyon’s Dry Lakes, Reynolds uses a road sign as a constant against which the changing landscape is emphasized. Similarly, in the example of the images of USU’s Old Main building, where the building is not so much framed as it is highly obscured by the surrounding trees, Reynolds’ attention to the natural surroundings unsettles the notion of the building as subject. Evident throughout the works featured here is Reynolds’ penchant for apposing static structures with fluctuating natural surroundings.

This exhibition is curated by Adriane N. Dalton, Assistant Curator and Manager of Exhibitions for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University.

The exhibition is made possible with the generous support of the Caine College of the Arts, The Merrill-Cazier Library, and the Alumni Association.