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Art is Fernando Reyes’s second career, following 17 years in San Francisco’s banking industry. A lifelong creator, he began as a self-taught artist before pursuing formal training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned his BFA in 1997. After graduation, Reyes returned to the Bay Area, establishing a studio in Oakland’s Jingletown district in 1999, which remains an anchor for his practice. In 2022, he relocated to Somerset in the Sierra Foothills, where he opened a second studio while continuing to welcome visitors to Jingletown.

Reyes’s early work reflected an academic approach, with a strong emphasis on figuration and landscapes. A turning point came in 2014, when a visit to MoMA’s Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition inspired him to reimagine his practice. Like Matisse, Reyes discovered a fresh and liberating way to compose, blending figuration and abstraction in dynamic new ways.

Over more than two decades, Reyes has built an extensive exhibition history across national and regional venues. In 2018, he was honored with a career retrospective at the Mexican Museum of Art in San Francisco. His work is included in the collections of Stanford University Medical Center, Alameda County Arts Collection, Norwest in Menlo Park, Sutter Cathedral Hills Hospital in San Francisco, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. Today, he divides his time between Oakland and the Sierra Foothills, drawing inspiration from both urban and natural landscapes.