Friendship with artist leads to Taos outpost
Tulsans Kent and Jeanette Young simply loved the landscapes of New Mexico.
While traveling through northern New Mexico in the 1970s, they were inspired by the vivid colors of the desert and mountains.
So when they got home and saw a painting in a Tulsa art gallery of New Mexico scenery, they bought it.
They later met and became friends with the artist.
All of that helped lead to a major gift for Oklahoma State University that has turned into the acclaimed Doel Reed Center for the Arts near Taos.
“We really loved the art, so when we found out the artist lived in Taos, we wanted to meet him,” said Kent Young, a retired public relations executive with CITGO Petroleum. “We just called him, and he invited us to visit him at his ranch. We went out there and drove right past him, an internationally famous artist standing next to a mailbox.
“We finally found the place, and he spent a lot of time showing us his collection and talking about art. A real friendship grew out of that meeting.”
It has been about 40 years since that introduction to Doel Reed, but the Youngs remained friends with the family through the years and helped secure the ranch and buildings for OSU.
“The Reeds would be so blown away and happy by how their homes and studio are being used to teach students,” said Jeanette Young. “It is being used just as they had hoped.”
Reed was hired by OSU in 1924 to develop and direct the university’s art department. He retired in 1959 to his ranch in Taos but continued producing award-winning art until his death in 1985.
The Doel Reed Center, which is actually a few miles south of Taos in the community of Talpa, includes artists in residence and summer courses for students and community members.
The ranch, covering about five acres, includes two adobe homes andaformer goat shed that Reed used as a studio.
“They were fascinating people, and we really enjoyed being around them,” said Young. “When it came time for the ranch to be passed on, his daughter, also an OSU graduate, wanted her alma mater to have it.
“All we did was help make sure that was done. It is really a terrific place. It is a wonderful addition to the educational offerings at OSU.”
Eventually, all of the buildings and land were gifted to OSU in 2010 by Reed’s daughter, Martha, also a noted artist.
It has turned into one of the most scenic and inspiring outposts for OSU students, faculty and friends. It was dedicated in 2015.
Doel Reed died in 1985 at age 91. His wife, Jane, also a fine artist, died in 1993.
The Youngs vowed to help Reed’s daughter fulfill a dream of donating the family property to OSU for use as a teaching facility. She wanted the donation to be a tribute to her father.
Kent (who served as the personal representative of Martha’s estate) and Jeanette worked closely with the OSU Foundation on the transfer of the estate.
“We wanted to help make sure their wishes, to pass this on to OSU, were fulfilled,” Kent said.
The Doel Reed Center includes architecture, history, literature, geology and botany classes. Native American studies and faculty sabbaticals are also on the schedule.
“I think the word 'outpost' is perfect for the Doel Reed Center,” said Hollye Goddard, advisory committee chair for the center. “Not every student or person can go overseas and experience different cultures. However, the Doel Reed Center is close enough to the campus in Stillwater and yet very different in culture, geography and history.
“This part of the campus, located in a beautiful area of northern New Mexico, is somewhere that students and faculty and alumni and others can enjoy themselves and learn at the same time.”
This summer the center will offer college credit classes about communities, specifically those in the Taos area; art and culture of Spanish New Mexico; and movies and television shows filmed in the southwest.
“So many of the students at OSU are from Oklahoma and northern Texas, and this is a way for them to get a real multicultural experience without needing to leave the country,” said Carol Moder, director of the Doel Reed Center for the Arts. “The center is a pretty unusual endeavor for a state university to take on. You need a lot of people involved who have a creative vision because you are investing in a different state.
“You don’t see a lot of state universities invest in an out-of-the-box endeavor. I know the students who come here are very inspired by the setting and will learn more than if they just took a course on it without experiencing the culture out here.”
The Doel Reed Center also has leisure-learning courses; this summer those include a study of northern New Mexico authors, New Mexico culture, geology of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, beginning and intermediate fly-fishing, pueblo and Spanish cooking, and paper-making.
“We’re always looking for ways to expand what we offer,” said Goddard, who is an OSU engineering grad, a native of Broken Arrow and now living in Arizona. “We have been working on the buildings at the center for a number of years. As someone involved in construction, it has been an interesting process. I believe we’ve done a good job of preserving the homes and the studio.
“Now, we are building up the number of accredited courses and leisurelearning classes. People can go out there, have some fun while learning.”
Martha’s home, the parents’ home and Reed’s art studio are all historic adobe structures.
Acclaimed for his black-and-white aquatint prints, Reed was a member of the prestigious National Academy of Design, the only Oklahoman to achieve that distinction. His works can be found in numerous private collections and almost every major museum in the United States, as well the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. He was recognized as the “undisputed master of the aquatint” in the 20th century.
Martha was also a wellknown artist in her own right. She designed and produced, with the help of women from the Taos Pueblo, Southwest fashions such as hand-pleated broomstick skirts, velvet blouses and shirts adorned with sterling silver buttons. She had a shop, Martha’s of Taos, located adjacent to the famous Taos Inn.
Her list of clients included European nobility, former first lady Rosalynn Carter and Hollywood movie stars. Her shop made all of the garments for a wedding of movie star Dennis Hopper.
The studio serves as a mini-museum and working studio with Reed’s art materials and printing press in place for use by art students or visiting print-makers. “Doel, Jane and Martha would be absolutely amazed at what OSU has done with their property and the Doel Reed Center program,” Kent Young said. “It is just remarkable, far beyond what Martha and I started talking about in 2005, thanks to OSU and its dedicated supporters.”
OSU President Burns Hargis has been a regular attendee at events in Taos.
“(Martha's) gift has really raised the visibility for OSU art and other disciplines,” said Hargis. “To have a major facility and program of this magnitude in this art mecca (Taos) provides us with tremendous opportunities that never existed before.”