Cyril Reade
Director of Camden Center for the Arts
Associate Professor of Art History
Ph.D. University of Rochester
cyril.reade@rutgers.edu
(856) 225-6242
Fine Arts Building, Rm. 250
Biography
Cyril Reade is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at Rutgers University-Camden and Director of the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (RCCA). He joined Rutgers Camden in September 2011; before that appointment, he taught art history at the Rochester Institute of Technology, sculpture at the University of Western Ontario, London ON; and foundation studies at Concordia University, Montreal and at Université Laval, Québec. He published his thesis dissertation Mendelsohn to Mendelssohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin (Peter Lang, 2007) and co-edited Porous Boundaries: Art and Essays in honor of Janet Wolff with David Peters Corbett (Manchester University Press, 2015). He is currently preparing the catalog to accompany a 2024-2025 exhibition of Donald Lokuta’s suite of photographs of the George Segal studio in the year 2000, when the sculptor was no longer able to work in the studio.
Reade has written catalog essays and/or exhibition reviews about the work of Jean Lantier, Holly King, Jocelyn Gasse, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Wyn Geleynse, David Merritt, Sylvia Ptak, Betty Goodwin, Angela Grauerholz, Martha Townsend, Irene Whittome, John Greyson, Allen Topolski, Cheryl Sourkes, and William Kentridge. As an independent curator, Reade curated the work of Elizabeth Cohen, Emile Deveraux, Scott McCarney, Cheryl Sourkes, Rita Bakacs, Susan Lakin, Ross Racine, and Allen Topolski before joining the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts.
At the Center’s Stedman Gallery, he curated or co-curated the work of Bruce Garrity, Ken Hohing, Michael Bartmann, Shuli Sadé, Tim Portlock, Eric Porter, George Segal, Scott Pelnat, Allen Topolski, and Mickey McGrath. The Stedman Gallery’s programming paid particular attention to representing and engaging with the City of Camden, co-curating or organizing the following exhibitions: Visions of Camden (2013), Camden Collects (2014), Sounds of Camden (2014), Look Again: The Young People of Camden (2016), and Picturing Camden (2017), and contributing to, editing, and overseeing publication of these exhibition’s catalogs.
In 2019, Reade led the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts in a partnership with the City of Camden and Coopers Ferry Partnership (now Camden Community Partnership) that was awarded a one-million-dollar Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge grant funding art projects that address civic issues. A New View–Camden brought attention to the plague of illegal dumping in the city of Camden by installing 8 temporary public art projects on vacant or abandoned lots. In 2021 a Stedman Gallery exhibition and catalog presented the proposals and photographs of the finalists’ projects.
Portraits of Camden (2022) presented the work of six artists representing different generations exploring their significant ties to Camden in a variety of media. From traditional portraiture in painting and photography to conceptual mapping of the city, the exhibition presented diverse approaches to portraiture that spoke to the resilience of the city’s residents.