INTO THE LIGHT
Jamie Reid: A Memorial Exhibition
February 29th – March 29th, 2024, Mondays to Fridays
Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool School of Art and Design
Liverpool John Moores University
John Lennon Art and Design Building
2 Duckinfield Street, Liverpool L3 5RD
INTO THE LIGHT is a tribute to the artist Jamie MacGregor Reid (1947 – 2023) containing artworks from his personal archive, the counterculture archives acquired by Prof. Colin Fallows for the LJMU Special Collections and Archives, and private collections. The exhibition was planned in the last year of Reid’s life and takes place as a memorial celebration of the artist’s work.
British artist, Jamie Reid, was a romantic, rebel, iconoclast, anarchist and lover of nature. Reid is known internationally as the art director and graphic designer of the Sex Pistols, creating the internationally impactful DIY aesthetic of punk – an immediately recognisable attitude and style that resonates across the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition aims to explore important stages of this influential artist’s work and includes rare and previously unseen works, artefacts, video and documentation.
The exhibition features a selection of drawings, paintings, posters, banners, videos, and publications including Reid’s seminal early-1970s Suburban Press, to his work with the Sex Pistols, and onwards to the 1980s and 1990s with various socio-political campaigns. In addition to his earlier work with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, this exhibition features documentation of Reid’s collaborative work with international fashion houses including Comme des Garçons and Valentino. The natural world was an ever-present passion for Reid and his limited edition boxed loose-leaf book, Eight-fold Year (2015), together with documentation of his final large-scale land-art piece at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in St. Austell, Cornwall, are exhibited here for the first time.
Forever a freethinker, ready with a contrary thought-provoking opinion and always moving forward, Reid was a visiting part-time lecturer at the Liverpool School of Art working with printed textile design students in the mid-1980s. He subsequently became a patron and integral member of the community enterprise, the Florence Institute in Liverpool.
Artists, designers and stylists continue to be fascinated and influenced by Reid and his work. When representatives of the Italian fashion company, Valentino, came to visit him at The Florrie, they discovered something kind and humane within his work. It was in his human warmth and compassion where Jamie Reid’s greatest strengths as an artist became increasingly visible, and one of his main concerns was to encourage others to fulfil their potential and move forward – as he would say, INTO THE LIGHT!