ACK REILLY - Bio - Curriculum Vitae - Exhibitions and Collections Shortly after receiving his MFA from Florida State University, in 1978 Jack Reilly moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career as an artist. Reilly's paintings were discovered in 1979 by prominent Los Angeles art dealer Molly Barns, who offered him a solo exhibition with her gallery. That same year, curator Donald Brewer of the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California introduced Reilly’s new work in a major museum exhibition entitled The Reality of Illusion, which opened at the Denver Art Museum and traveled for two years to the Oakland Museum, USC Fisher Museum, Johnson Museum at Cornell, among other institutions nationwide. This series of museum exhibitions established Reilly as one of the original members of the Abstract illusionism painting movement. In 1979 Reilly received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. By the early 1980s, Reilly's paintings were represented by galleries in major American cities including the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles, Aaron Berman Gallery in New York, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts in San Francisco, Marilyn Butler gallery in Scottsdale and numerous others. Articles and reviews on Reilly's paintings were subsequently published in Arts Magazine, Art Week, the Los Angeles Times, New York Artworld, and in books including American Art Now by noted author and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, and Inside the L.A. Artist by Marva Marrow. Such notable collectors of the era, including Fred and Marcia Weisman, Steve Martin, Daniel Melnick, and numerous other private collectors have acquired Reilly’s paintings. In the 1990s he was commissioned by the County of San Diego to execute a major forty-foot, site-specific, wall sculpture/painting for their public art program. An eighteen-foot shaped-canvas painting was later commissioned by American Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport. In 2012, the Bleicher Gallery in Los Angeles presented a solo exhibition of Reilly’s new paintings, as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, Art in L.A. 1945-1980. Continually active as a painter, widely collected and exhibited internationally, Reilly’s work can be found in numerous private, public and corporate collections including the Oakland Museum, Atlantic Richfield, American Airlines, and Verizon Communications, among others. In addition to Reilly's long-standing career as an exhibiting painter and professor of art at California State University, he currently divides his time living and working in Hawaii and California.