For his paintings, prints, drawings, collages, and constructions, Reed used abstract symbols, colours, and textures from remembered symbolic fragments he encountered in his everyday experiences when he was younger. Influenced by other colleagues on the Yale staff like Jon Schueler—a painter of hot atmospheric skies—and visiting tutor Philip Guston, Reed favoured large, complex compositions, busy with movement and intricate, tumbling geometric forms.
Usually, these prolific works were in vibrant colour, but occasionally they were restricted to black and white. Such energetic works include Plum Nellie, Sea Stone (1972); the San Romano Series (1979); Power of Ten, No Count (1996); Galactic Journal: Rose Hill Drive (2005); Galactic Journal, Washington Park (1999–2009); and Le Relais Du Postillon, Florence Room 2012 - Untitled #28 (2012).
Reed always identified with the Black experience, and he acknowledged the indignity and constant grinding down caused by white oppression. However, because he was a passionate abstractionist who avoided didactic art and narrative, his achievements were initially overlooked during the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Reed stated, ‘I think of myself as an artist who is Black. An artist who goes to the same well as Black identity artists for metaphors for experiences that I have had in the stereotype Black experience.‘Greatly influential as a teacher, Reed made a considerable impact on the work of artists including Stanley Whitney, Tala Madani, Rachel Rose, and Tschabalala Self.
