The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry opened its doors for the first time since October for the opening of its new exhibit, “Larry Reed: Cinematic Shadows,” which celebrates and showcases the work of Larry Reed, an American shadow puppeteer and one of the first Western artists to train in Wayang, traditional shadow theater from Bali, Indonesia.
The opening consisted of a tour of the exhibition led by its curators, Farley Gwazda and Caryl Kientz, who took spectators through the archival items of Reed, and through an interactive portion with recreations of Reed’s puppets. Gwazda and Kientz also led a panel moderated by professor Matthew Cohen from the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut.
Reed founded ShadowLight Productions in 1972 and is best known for eventually combining techniques from cinema, modern theater and dance for a new method for casting shadows. His best-known works are the 1979 documentary “Shadow Master” and the multimedia shadow theater production “In Xanadu.”
Kientz, the managing director of ShadowLight Productions, and Gwazda, Reed’s archivist, worked closely with each other to put the exhibition together.
“This exhibition is almost archival, coming from my side, but also a theatrical production,” Gwazda said in an interview. “So, it’s very ambitious and very immersive.”
Through the interactive portion, viewers can put on recreations of Reed’s 3D shadow masks and play around with their shadows on a screen, offering them a unique perspective of what it would be like to be a live performer during a Wayang performance.
Though shadow puppetry has a long-standing reputation as a game for children, Reed sought to bring deeper themes to it, spending 10 years learning the art form and learning two languages to perfect it.
In traditional Wayang performances, some characters speak Kawi, and then other characters translate that into Balinese.
“Larry took those characters and made them translate Kawi into English, so he made this theater widely available,” Gwazda said. “I hope that when people walk into this exhibition, they can look at the depth of this tradition.”
Throughout the panel, Kientz and Gwazda spoke of their respective friendships with Reed, emphasizing how much of a collaborator he was.
“What I learned from Larry is that collaboration means coming to a project with other artists with an openness to the ideas that will be generated when we are all together,” wrote Kientz, who met Reed in 2008. “Those ideas that do not exist in us individually, but that happened in the same space when we are all working on the same project.”
Reed died in March 2026, and Kientz hopes that the exhibition at the Ballard serves as a “living legacy.”
“I hope that people see how Larry’s curiosity and wide range of interests led him to have a very rich and meaningful artistic career and also a rich and significant artistic community,” she wrote in an email.
Gwazda said that the exhibition should preserve the art form as well.
“Larry wanted his work available to practitioners: people who wanted to pick up a puppet, people who want to play and people who want to make something beautiful. This is a way of playful creation that anyone can do,” Gwazda said.
“I think that if Larry Reed could know that he could continue to inspire people to do that, that that would be really meaningful to him.”