Materials from Nature

Artist Rachelle Reichert Is Inspired by Human Industrialization


Images courtesy Rachelle Reichert

CFA Alumni

Materials from Nature

Artist Rachelle Reichert is inspired by human industrialization

June 25, 2026
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Many artists view their materials—the acrylic paints, the sculpting clay, the canvas—as vessels for the beauty they create. For Rachelle Reichert, the materials are the message. Reichert (’07), who lives in Oakland, Calif., and describes herself as a research-based artist, makes art inspired by natural spaces that have been affected by human industrialization. She studies satellite and large-scale land survey images for signs of human influence and even incorporates materials found at the sites into her work, including salt evaporated from around the San Francisco Bay.

Reichert has been making art with found materials since she was a kid. She studied painting at the School of Visual Arts and turned to more research-based works a few years into her career.

“I felt there were questions that I couldn’t answer with painting and subjects I wanted to explore that I couldn’t do with painting. I felt very limited,” she says. “What guides me now is very much about place—it has a specific context that it’s meant to speak about, and the medium is dictated by the conceptual needs. To be honest, that’s a harder way of working.”

Mother (2024) Bronze, San Francisco Bay salt, mixed media; 42 x 9 1/2 x 8 in.

From afar, many of Reichert’s pieces are textured works inside a circular or cloud-shaped metal frame. Step closer, however, and you’ll notice the frame is filled with salt that is occasionally interspersed with microplastics and tiny pieces of organic matter.

For these pieces, she used satellite images to determine the conditions of evaporation pools around the bay. She collects salt, sometimes grinding redwood branches charred from wildfires and adding it to the salt. To work out a piece’s color and composition, and because the salt is so difficult to remove once it’s placed inside the metal frame, Reichert first sketches her pieces in a notebook. She created a chemical process, with the assistance of fine art conservators, to adhere the salt to itself inside the frame, which is sometimes powder-coated.

Commissioned salt works of Reichert’s hang in Meta’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters and at the Mandarin Oriental Ritz hotel in Madrid. Her pieces have been exhibited widely, including at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture in Portland, Ore.

Reichert wants viewers to glean whatever they need from her work, whether it’s the aesthetic beauty of a piece or an interest in a specific location or material. For her, though, it’s the questions—about the mess humans leave in their wake, about what she’s capable of doing with a particular material—that drive her.

“When I’m making work about and with the natural world, it feels very urgent and important, not just to me—and that’s something I find valuable in art,” Reichert says. “I think I’m just creating the work I want to see.”

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  • Steve Holt

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    Steve Holt is a senior editor and writer responsible for print alumni magazines at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, School of Theology, and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. He came to BU in 2022 from Appalachian Mountain Club, where he was a senior editor at the nonprofit’s award-winning member magazine. Profile