top of page

A Quiet Place for Quiet Thinking / In Search of Alex Reed

"A Quiet Place for Quiet Thinking" is a short essay on the spiritual and material role the Quiet House, a small stone memorial structure on the Lake Eden campus of Black Mountain College, played within the life of the College. The essay was published in 2022 in The Quiet House: Stillness in Lake Eden, the fourth volume in the Faith in Arts series of chapbooks produced by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and Atelier Editions [more here]. The essay examines the construction of the Quiet House by a small group of dedicated community members including the artist and architect Alex Reed, carpenter and designer Molly Gregory, weaver and educator Eva Zhitlowsky, and anthropologist Roman Maciejczyk.

This essay grew out of a larger project researching the life and work of Alex Reed, a Black Mountain College student, artist, architect, gardener, and designer. The first phase of this work was presented in a talk, "In Search of Alex Reed," given 11/13/21 at ReViewing Black Mountain College 12, hosted by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

Reed was a student at Black Mountain from 1935 to 1940, and remained at the school until February 1943 as an assistant teacher to Josef Albers. Today he is best known for building the Quiet House with Molly Gregory’s assistance in 1942, and for his collaboration with Anni Albers in 1939-41 on a variety of pieces of Jewelry made from hardware. Reed was also a skilled weaver and painter; Josef Albers thought he was the best art student of all his peers, and he grew so close to both Albers that he traveled with them in Mexico twice. But Reed’s life was also a troubled one, and since his untimely death in 1965, his story has become mostly lost to history and traces of his work have become difficult to find. In this talk, which was illustrated with extant and lost works by Reed, I attempted to reconstruct his special role in the Black Mountain College community, focusing on the collaborative creative relationships he had with other members of the College.

I plan to eventually publish "In Search of Alex Reed," and in the meantime welcome any additional information anyone has on Reed, his life, or his work.

bottom of page