Summer Wheat: Forager

The Future (and the past) is Female: Summer Wheat’s whimsical, often tongue-in-cheek tableaux in rich jewel tones punctuated with bright neons, teem with fantastical figures that imagine tribes of women hunting, collaborating, celebrating, and ultimately replacing millennia of images of male rulers and warriors.Summer Wheat’s unique formative experiences with art growing up in Oklahoma were shaped by the aesthetic and conceptual drive of the images that surrounded her from the rich textures Native American weavings to the brilliant hues of Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers. Bridging those early influences with the canon of Western art (from ancient sculpture to medieval tapestries) and popular references such as astrology and music videos, the artist’s work centers female archetypes 0in her expansive practice of painting, sculpture, and large-scale installation.For the artist’s first monograph, curator Jen Sudul Edwards discusses the wide range of subjects that inform Wheat’s