November 8, 2009
Reflection : A journey to my past and Philadelphia.
A brief reflection on a 1975 jewelry-making book that belonged to Reyes’s father, family memory, and carrying that lineage into the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show.
Selected historical studio writing by Gustav Reyes, preserved as part of the evolving Studio Archive.
The entries below were originally published between 2009 and 2012. Their wording and publication dates are preserved; archival notes are added only where missing media or later context requires clarification.
Read as archival documents rather than as a retrospective artist statement, these entries preserve the language, questions, and working context of the studio at the time they were written. Together with the later archive, CV, and press record, they offer a direct view of a practice while it was still developing.
A brief reflection on a 1975 jewelry-making book that belonged to Reyes’s father, family memory, and carrying that lineage into the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show.
On Sam Maloof, craft identity, sensitivity to material, and the idea that making can become a physical manifestation of the maker’s inner life.
A cornerstone origin narrative: childhood, Reyes’s father, woodworking, the structural discovery behind the wooden ring, and the beginnings of Simply Wood Rings.
Adornment as “of the self,” and jewelry as a way of taking what exists in the mind and expressing it outward through the body.
An early articulation of material memory: wood as a record of time, place, environment, growth, and human interaction.