Chicago + Mexico City
Gustav Reyes is a contemporary artist born in Mexico in 1968 and based between Chicago and Mexico City. Working primarily in wood, he creates contemporary art jewelry and sculptural objects that explore impermanence, material value, cultural identity, and the relationship between conceptual thought and embodied, biological experience.
Reyes was raised on the southwest side of Chicago, where his early relationship with making was shaped by his father, a carpenter who also made jewelry. He studied painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1986 to 1988, participated in a study abroad program in Almuñécar, Spain, and later pursued woodworking with a concentration on hand tools at the Chicago Bauhaus Academy.
Wood remains central to Reyes’s practice because of both its physical behavior and its impermanence. In contrast to precious metals and gemstones, which are often associated with permanence and inheritance, wood records time, responds to its environment, and eventually returns to the earth. His work uses that temporal quality to reflect on mortality, memory, and the human desire to locate value beyond conventional ideas of preciousness.
His practice brings handwork and contemporary fabrication into the same continuum. Bending, steam and cold-forming, hand tools, laser cutting, CNC processes, and 3D printing are not treated as opposing methods, but as evolving human technologies that allow thought, material, and physical making to inform one another. Salvaged and carefully selected woods are used not only for their visual qualities, but also for the histories and associations they carry.
Reyes’s cultural identity also informs the work. Born in Mexico and raised in Chicago, he draws from the layered histories of Mexico, including Indigenous material traditions, colonial histories, and contemporary culture, while also being shaped by Chicago’s industrial and architectural environment. These influences meet in work concerned with nature, making, belonging, and the relationship between the intellectual and biological dimensions of human experience.
His work has been presented at institutions and exhibitions including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, JOYA Barcelona Art Jewellery Fair, the Racine Art Museum, and Craft Forms at the Wayne Art Center. Works by Reyes are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design and the Yale University Art Gallery. He has also served as a conference speaker for the Society of North American Goldsmiths and lectured in the Artists Now! series at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts.
Reyes’s work and practice have been featured in American Craft, Ornament, Metalsmith, Chicago Magazine, and The New York Times.
