Judges
Natasha Reichle
Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art, ASIAN ART MUSEUM, SAN FRANCISCO
Natasha Reichle is a curator who specializes in the art and architecture of Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia and island Southeast Asia.
At the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, she has curated shows on a wide range of exhibitions on topics as diverse as wayang golek puppets, Southeast Asian jewelry, and seventeenth-century Jesuit maps. Her 2011 exhibition Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance was the first major exhibition dedicated to the art of Bali in the United States.
Her last exhibition, Weaving Stories, drew from the museum’s collection of Southeast Asian textiles, and uses archival images, macro-photography, and poetry to illuminate the role of textiles as markers of identity, objects of status, and symbols of faith. In “Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks,” Reichle explored questions of provenance and the ethics of marine archeology by tracing the journeys of two sets of artworks to the museum from Champa and colonial Vietnam. In 2018, she curated Philippine Art: Collecting Art, Collecting Memories, an exhibition that worked with the local Filipino community to incorporate community memories into the stories of artworks in the collection.
Reichle has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation focused on ancient sculpture from Indonesia and resulted in the book, Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).