This story is from Prattfolio’s feature “Pivot Points,” on Pratt alumni navigating moments of uncertainty, change, and transformation in their life and work.
Andrew Reach was at work on a once-in-a-lifetime project, the Smithsonian-affiliated Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, and suddenly he knew something wasn’t right.
In his office at the architecture firm HOK in Miami, he thought he was having a heart attack. It turned out to be a severe case of spondylolisthesis, a failure of a spinal disc segment that, in Reach’s case, could have been catastrophic. (As his spine surgeon put it in lay terms: “Your head is falling off your spine.”)
A year and a half before this complication, he had been eager to get back into architecture practice after a back surgery fusing most of his spine, and jumped at the opportunity to work on the museum, but the long, focused hours he’d enthusiastically poured into the project, he thinks, brought everything to a head. This would be his last building.
From his art-filled office some 20 years later, Reach reflects on that experience with an optimism that belies the dark days that followed. “I don’t regret it,” he says. “Everything is meant to be. I had a productive career as an architect—I got the satisfaction of that—and I have this other side of myself that I don’t know I ever would have discovered.”
From an early age, Reach had been grappling with back pain from a condition called Scheuermann’s disease. In his 20s, there were days he felt his back was breaking in two after a day at work. After spondylolisthesis and a second spinal surgery, the pain and immobility would be all encompassing, but a change was happening. Laid up in the Florida room of his and husband Bruce Baumwoll’s home, looking out onto a lush palm tree hedge, surrounded by light and artwork and reading Jackson Pollack’s biography on a book stand, Reach began to tap into creative reserves that would open a new chapter for him.
It was Baumwoll, he says, who initiated the first project—collaged greeting cards made using Photoshop, which Reach picked up easily given his experience with CAD as an architect. When Reach began to make small digital drawings, Baumwoll insisted he up the scale. They bought a 44-inch Epson printer, and Baumwoll would load the paper and pin up the drawings for Reach to look at from his bed.
When a neighbor who spotted the work on a house visit connected Reach with a gallerist, he was quickly offered his first solo show. It featured digital works that riffed on forms like vertebrae and water, which as a swimmer and lover of the ocean from his childhood in Miami, had become a way of “escaping gravity,” he says. The show was called Beyond Pain.
“I was really in so much pain,” he says. “To this day, I deal with challenges with pain, and art continues to be art therapy for me. Especially then, it was like an escape hatch.”
Advice from the Field: Knowing Your Gifts
As creatives we have a built-in advantage to weather challenges and adversity. So when things get difficult and external noise and chaos surrounds you, use creativity in any form you can as an escape hatch.Whether it is physical or psychological challenges, or a trauma or any life-altering change, tapping into creativity is profoundly healing.
Even if you are at an impasse in the creativity in your profession, that creativity is still within you, hiding in plain sight, waiting to reemerge, perhaps in a different form you hadn’t expected.
But more than therapy, for Reach, it has meant the reinvention of a career. His work, which includes digital drawings, 3D animations—some with original music by Reach—and 3D-printed sculptural pieces, has been exhibited and installed in public spaces, particularly around his adopted home of Cleveland. Commissions for clients including Cleveland Clinic–Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are currently in progress, and at the time of this writing, he is also creating a work of functional sculpture with Cleveland-based artist Ariel Vergez featuring one of his “Model Citizens” resting on a concrete plinth that doubles as a bench, for Vergez’s project The Art Garden, supported by The Transformative Arts Fund grant from the City of Cleveland.
Represented by ArtLifting, a company that works with artists with disabilities, Reach has seen his work find broader audiences as well, and he recently sold a work to be installed at Sony Pictures’ Los Angeles offices.
Courtesy of the artist
Lately in his artwork, he has also been reconnecting with architecture, and the sea. He remembers the encouragement he got at Pratt, from professors like Hanford Yang, to tap into relationships like these. “There was a side of me that felt the oppression of gravity, and there was a side of me that felt the freedom of the work—whether it was working on an architectural project or being in the pool, swimming,” he says. “I liked that at Pratt, I was able to explore a more emotional aspect of form making. Hanford really pushed me to express—architecture was more than the function of a building. You could also tell a story, and evoke spiritual engagement.”
Two of his student projects, included in the 1988 Pratt Journal of Architecture: Form; Being; Absence published by Rizzoli, were titled “House Held Captive” and “House That Wants to Fly.”
Astradome by Andrew Reach, BArch ’86. He has recently been creating his own music for his video pieces, having taught himself composition using the digital audio workstation app Waveform and a MIDI keyboard.
It’s funny how things come full circle, Reach reflects: “There was a lot of force behind needing to create, this explosion of creativity that I thought was coming out of nowhere—but I don’t think it was coming out of nowhere. I think it was always inside me, and it was just waiting for the circumstances and technology to realize it.”