PHOENIX, AZ.- Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) announces the appointment of two new curators: Colin Pearson as the institution’s Curator for Asian Art and Dr. JoAnna Reyes as its new Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas. Reyes’ role is a collaborative appointment between Phoenix Art Museum and the School of Art in Arizona State University’s (ASU) Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In their respective roles, Pearson will develop exhibitions that draw from and highlight the Museum’s expansive Asian art collection, and Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections. Both Pearson and Reyes assume their roles effective immediately.

“We are thrilled to welcome Colin Pearson and JoAnna Reyes to the outstanding curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “Both Colin and JoAnna have deep expertise and significant experience within their respective fields and bring fresh, innovative perspectives to the presentation of the PhxArt Collection’s rich holdings. We are excited to see how their exhibitions engage and educate our audiences in new ways, reaffirming the Museum’s role as a space of belonging that reflects the breadth of experiences represented across our community.”

“I am both excited and humbled to be appointed as Phoenix Art Museum’s third curator of Asian art, and I look forward to sharing this incredibly rich collection with audiences in a variety of new ways,” said Pearson. “I feel passionately that the physical distance between Arizona and the places where these wonderful artworks originate does not need to be a barrier to the appreciation of their beauty. By approaching the collection with an open mind, I seek to help audiences discover what makes the artistic traditions of Asia distinct, highlight the intercultural exchanges that have always connected us, and make Asian art accessible and relevant for the diverse and family- oriented audiences here in the Valley of the Sun.”

“I am excited to join the curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum and explore the Museum’s incredible collection of art from across the Americas,” said Reyes. “By taking a hemispheric approach, I hope to create exhibitions that highlight the migrations, exchanges, and shared stories that have shaped the region, with the goal of sparking new conversations and understanding of the art of the Americas.”

Colin Pearson assumes his new role as PhxArt’s Curator of Asian Art, bringing over a decade of experience curating collections of Asian artworks, ceramics, craft items, musical instruments, and ethnographic artifacts, with expertise on the effects of maritime and Silk Road trade routes on the arts of Tibet, China, and India. He previously served as the Museum’s adjunct curator of Asian art since 2024, overseeing the refresh of the Art of Asia galleries and curating exhibitions such as Chardi Kala: Rising Above Adversity, a presentation of Sikh artworks exploring the concept of unwavering optimism in the face of hardship. This year, Pearson will serve as coordinating curator for the Museum’s presentation of Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, and lead curator for the exhibition Flowers of the Punjab: Textiles of India and Beyond, both opening in September 2025.

In addition to his work at PhxArt, Pearson has collaborated on curatorial projects at Arizona State University (ASU) and catalogued a collection of nearly 200 textiles, artworks, and ethnographic objects for ASU’s Center for Asian Research. From 2020 to 2022, Pearson served as a curator for the Zayed National Museum in the United Arab Emirates, cultivating and sharing his extensive knowledge of ceramics and other export goods traded along overland and maritime routes from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. As a curator at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix from 2009 to 2020, Pearson organized special exhibitions of custom-inlaid guitars and Chinese antiquities. He also expanded the institution’s collection of instruments and artifacts from Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, as well as instruments from Europe and North America.

Pearson has delivered public talks and lectures on a wide range of topics relating to Asian art, including the musical and artistic cultures of Asia, connoisseurship and classification schemes, and the global legacies of cultural interactions throughout history. He earned his Bachelor of Music at California State University, Long Beach and his Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from the University of California at Riverside. He is currently working toward his PhD in Asian Art History at Arizona State University.

Dr. JoAnna Reyes’s collaborative appointment as the Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas at Phoenix Art Museum and Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) further deepens the collaboration between the leading art museum in the Southwest and one of the largest comprehensive arts programs at a public research university in the U.S. In her new role at PhxArt, Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections, expanding opportunities for audiences to consider connections across borders, time periods, and cultures.

Reyes’ first curatorial project at the Museum will be a collection installation in the institution’s newly renovated Art of the Americas and Europe galleries, which are re opening in November 2025. Drawing from the Museum’s Spanish Colonial and Latin American art collections, Reyes will highlight the traditions and innovations in the viceregal art of Latin America, and how artists of the period drew inspiration from Asian art objects and prints from Northern Europe to create innovative, sophisticated, and nuanced works imbued with traditional Indigenous techniques, Catholic devotional imagery, and new iconographies invented to honor local saints and miracles. The installation will also showcase contemporary works that exemplify how Latin American artists today reference this period in their practices.

In addition to her curatorial work, this fall Reyes will teach an ASU art history seminar, located in the Museum’s Education building. Reyes will use the PhxArt collection and new North Wing collection galleries to focus on a period between the 15th and 16th centuries often referred to as the Age of Discovery, when Europeans developed a growing fascination with collecting a wide array of antiquities, natural specimens, books, prints, drawings, paintings, and other projects, largely influenced by the exploration and colonization of the Americas. Students will examine the practices and theoretical frameworks that informed early modern collecting and how they evolved into contemporary museological contexts, particularly around topics of repatriation, restitution, and deaccessioning.

A specialist in the visual and material culture of viceregal Latin American and contemporary Chicana/o America, Reyes explores identity, art patronage, and how images and symbols, particularly from border regions, shape our understanding of place and culture. She developed the 2025 exhibition Agua es Vida at the Rio Salado Audubon Center and Samouraï: Armure du Guerrier (2011) at the musée du Quai Branly with the Barbier-Mueller Museum (Dallas), published an entry in Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800 (Delmonico, 2022), and co-authored an article in Feminist Formations (John Hopkins University Press, 2022), among other ongoing writing and book projects.

Reyes, who earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, worked at the Getty Research Institute and served as the curatorial assistant at LACMA (2013-2015) and Mellon Fellow (2016-2017). Previously, she worked at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (NY) and the Barbier-Mueller Museum, and from 2016-2019, she served as the book review editor for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.