That same year, Reiss took a job teaching painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he brought Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Nancy Graves, and Hilton Kramer to teach summer courses. In 1971 he returned to California, where he headed the graduate art program at Claremont Graduate University for thirty years, implementing a community-minded approach that brought national recognition to the program. An endowed chair in art was established in his name at the university in 2010.
Over the course of his widely varied sixty-year career, Reiss exhibited work at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and Documenta 7 (1982). He received fourteen solo museum exhibitions, among them The Dancing Lessons: 12 Sculptures (1977) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). A 2014 retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at Cal State Fullerton highlighted his career of continual self-reinvention. His works are held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum, all in Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, among others.
Writing in the pages of Artforum in 1977, critic Peter Clothier compared Reiss’s dioramas to the “disnarrative” novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. “The viewer’s participation, then, is not simply that of putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (whose final piece may be missing), since all the necessary elements are present. The process is rather one of continuing reconstitution, with the realization that each reconstituted structure is a provisional one,” wrote Clothier. “Beyond the fantasy of the work, it thus becomes a model for our experience of reality itself.”
