About
Rachel Reichert is an artist whose studio practice is rooted in craft and expands across jewelry, small sculpture, installation, writing, and photography. Across these forms, she examines landscape, architecture, and layered histories of the United States, particularly in the West and Midwest.
Reichert builds objects that compress larger environments into smaller form, such as jewelry modeled after collapsing structures, cast metal forms echoing volcanic rock and flatware responding to post-industrial economies. Her works function as fragments drawn from specific geographies and rebuilt through material translation.
Her practice operates through processes of translation and reduction. Projects often begin with a structure, site, or historical condition that is selectively isolated, edited, and rebuilt. The resulting works hold the a space between reference and abstraction, asking to be handled, worn, and closely examined.
Sustained engagement with artist-built environments and artist-centered spaces has shaped Reichert’s inquiry into how artists construct worlds and how those worlds persist through transference rather than preservation alone. From 2015 - 2022, she led the multi-phase restoration and public programming of the James Castle House, stewarding the historic home and workplace as a living site for artists and audiences while deepening her understanding of material inheritance and creative legacy. This work sits within a broader trajectory of community building: in 2014, she co-founded The Atlanta School, an experimental art school and residency in Atlanta, Idaho, where a remote mountain town became a site of collective inquiry for nearly a decade. She also oversaw the preservation and transformation of the Erma Hayman House, a historic home and cultural site rooted in Boise’s River Street neighborhood, and between 2022 - 2025 supported the Ruth Foundation for the Arts during its formative years, contributing to the launch of national programs and the development of an artist-centered project space.
Her evolving project Fool’s Gold, launching in 2026, extends these concerns through table objects and material experiments that examine domestic space, small-batch production, and post-industrial material culture.
Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Reichert develops her work within an active arts community while also supporting artists and arts organizations through consulting, residency development, and program design. Her artwork is held in private collections across the United States and has been featured in The New York Times, Sunset Magazine, Hyperallergic and Metalsmith Magazine, among others.