For Sedona artist Reagan Word, creativity has always been more than a profession. Reagan credits it as a lifelong calling. Artist, author, architect, painter, illustrator, and sculptor, Word has built a career across so many different mediums, guided by an intuitive eye for beauty and a deep desire to give form to imagination. His work reflects a rare combination of technical discipline and creative freedom, shaped by decades spent designing, drawing, building, and bringing ideas to life.
Word’s path as an artist began early. In second grade, he received his first blue ribbon for a crayon drawing of a dinosaur. It’s funny, but that tiny moment was the first of so many steps for Reagan. He started to gravitate toward a life of making. He sensed that he was born to build and create, a belief that would carry him through a career spanning architecture, painting, illustration, animation, and sculpture.
In 1967, Word graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture. Later, he would work as an architect and architectural illustrator from 1973 all the way until 2016, developing a refined understanding of structure, space, proportion, and form.
For more than 20 years, Reagan has created architectural renderings for firms across the country, helping architects and clients see their ideas before they take physical form.
“Rendering my ideas before they exist is a great way to peek into the future of my imagination,” Word says. That ability to envision what has not yet been built continues to inform his art today. And in 2016, when retirement came knocking, Reagan got a renewed sense of freedom, allowing him to return to sculpture with what he describes as a new fearlessness. His architectural background became the foundation for a broader creative life. Sedona, Arizona, informs much of his work today, where the landscape, wildlife, and spiritual atmosphere of the Southwest have become important sources of inspiration. He painted in dry brush watercolor, creating wildlife and Southwestern landscapes whose prints were sold nationwide. By 1982, he had begun sculpting, first focusing on wildlife before expanding into figurative bronze works.
Over time, Word’s creative practice grew into an impressive and varied body of work. In addition to architectural renderings, paintings, and sculptures, he has created custom homes, book illustrations, and animations. Yet sculpture has become the center of his current artistic focus. Through bronze and steel, Word explores form, movement, imagination, and meaning, shaping works that feel both grounded and aspirational. His sculptural monuments have become part of Sedona’s public landscape, including installations throughout the city, notably in its roundabouts. These works connect art with place, allowing residents and visitors to experience beauty in motion as part of daily life. Now, Exposures International Gallery of Fine Art is proud to display his current collection of bronzes, offering viewers a closer look at the depth, skill, and imagination behind his work.
For Word, beauty is not passive. It is a force that calls, challenges, and reveals. His purpose as an artist is to make visible ideas that inspire others to look more deeply at creation and imagine what may still be possible.
“My calling is to make visible ideas that inspire and motivate others to look at the beauty of not only this creation but venture beyond and imagine what is yet to be,” he says. Guided by beauty, shaped by architecture, and renewed through sculpture, Reagan Word continues to create with wonder, discipline, and faith in imagination. As Rumi wrote, and as Word embraces, “May the beauty that you love be what you do.”
