NADA Miami 2022

Favoring malleable structures and expressive color palettes, Summer Wheat’s tactile paintings merge process and narrative to ponder individual and collective human experience as seen through various moments in art history. Drawing on rich traditions from Egyptian relief sculptures to Modernist painting, Wheat’s textural paintings destabilize material boundaries and elevate quotidian life through scale and movement.

Borrowing from the logic of medieval tapestries hung as symbols of authority, Wheat allows acrylic paint to ooze through fine wire mesh causing figures to emerge and dance upon lush, fiber-like surfaces that coalesce into heroic history paintings.

Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, OK; Lives and works in New York, NY) received a B.A. from the University of Central Oklahoma and an M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Smack Mellon, New York, NY; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK. 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; the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. Wheat has received several awards and prizes including, the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago in 2019 and the New York NADA Artadia Award in 2016.

In March 2022, the Kansas City Museum announced that it selected Summer Wheat to transform the museum’s Carriage House Beaux-Arts Conservatory on the property into a light-filled sacred space entitled JewelHouse. slated to open in 2024.