Summer Wheat
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BIO
Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, OK) received a B.A. from the University of Central Oklahoma and an M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. She is known for her vibrant paintings, multifaceted sculptures, and immersive installations that weave together the history of materiality, figuration, and abstraction in both fine art and craft milieus. Wheat’s work examines various manifestations of labor, leisure, commerce, and class through the depiction of numerous figures and archetypes such as farmers, hunters, beekeepers, gardeners, weavers, bankers, and movie stars. Using a tongue-in- cheek type of humor inspired by comic strips, Wheat subverts conventional hierarchical structures and stereotypes to create more expansive depictions of daily life throughout history. A signature aspect of Wheat’s work is her expressive use of color and unique method of building a painting, which integrates various tools, from her fingers, to syringes, to plastic scrapers, to cake decorating paraphernalia. Using vibrant, almost fluorescent colors of acrylic paint, she combines multiple physical techniques—pushing paint through wire mesh, painting directly onto a heavily impastoed surface, or applying select embellishments—that require her to move around her canvas, working both vertically and horizontally, on the front and the back of each piece. The result is tactile, vivid work that engages process, form, and narrative equally, creating layered, non-linear compositions that offer alternative versions of history, mythology, and folklore.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Savannah School of Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Ziddoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Paris, France; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2020); KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Fondazione Mudima, Milan, Italy, Nazarian / Curcio; Los Angeles, CA; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Zidoun Bossuyt, Luxembourg; Braverman, Tel Aviv, Israel; Dirimart, Istanbul, Turkey; Smack Mellon, New York, NY; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK.
Select group exhibitions featuring her work include, Yaro Pickers, Harper’s Books, New York, NY; Summer Wheat and Hirosuke Yabe, Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI; America Will Be! Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Magnetic Fields, Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy; SEED, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; More Material, Salon 94, New York, NY; Expanding the Field of Abstraction, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; beyond the stretcher, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; and Paradox Maintenance Technicians: A comprehensive technical manual to contemporary painting from Los Angeles and Beyond, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA. Wheat’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. Wheat has received several awards and prizes including, the 2019 Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago and the 2016 New York NADA Artadia Award (2016). Summer Wheat is working with International Architects Atelier to transform the Kansas City Museum’s Beaux-Arts Conservatory into a light-filled sacred space titled “JewelHouse,” set to open in 2026. Wheat lives and works in New York.
