Summer Wheat’s vivid, textured, and beautiful paintings explore themes of labor, community, and the symbiotic relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Known for her innovative techniques and bold palette, the Oklahoma-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s practice is rooted in a tactile engagement with materiality and a narrative approach that bridges the mythical to the everyday.
At the heart of her work lies a commitment to storytelling and reimagining historical art traditions. Her ‘Fountain’ series is emblematic of this aesthetic approach. In these works, she draws upon the archetype of the caregiver and cultivator, often represented by female figures engaged in acts of planting, watering, and nurturing.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
The paintings reflect Wheat’s exploration of women’s roles in shaping physical and metaphorical landscapes, offering a celebratory yet, at the same time, critical examination of labor and creativity.
Now, Artspace in partnership with Artadia, is pleased to announce the release of Watering Weeds, 2024, a new series of unique limited edition prints by Summer Wheat, created in celebration of the non-profit grantmaking organization’s 25th anniversary.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
Based on an original large-scale painting of the same name, the Watering Weeds, 2024 edition consists of 30 unique hand-embellished prints that reflect the artist’s practice of pushing the boundaries of materiality and abstraction.
The 10-color screenprint with hand-painted gouache and flocked crystalina on 320gsm Coventry Rag paper measures 24.5 x 17.5 inches and is signed and numbered on the front. It is $1,950 framed / $1,750 unframed.
“The woman’s role as a fountain in Watering Weeds shows her role in nature as the water source for the garden,” Wheat tells Artspace. “The garden grows as it is watered, and both the figure and her setting are responding to each other. We constantly need to be cultivated, nurtured, manicured, fed. It’s coming from this idea of taking care of oneself within this garden or one’s personal sphere and harvesting what you’re sewing.”
Summer Wheat - photography Nir Arieli
Wheat’s ‘Fountain’ works highlight her engagement with art history, recalling frescoes, medieval tapestries, and folk art traditions. She employs a technique that mimics the texture of woven fabric, creating a richly tactile surface that blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. This textured approach, achieved by pushing paint through a fine mesh screen, lends her works an almost sculptural quality.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
She has described how the process allows her to build layers of color and texture in a way that evokes the labor-intensive processes of weaving or embroidery. The vibrancy of her palette meanwhile, rich greens, reds, blues, and gold, reinforces the vitality of the scenes she depicts, celebrating the abundance and fecundity of nature.
The series also resonates with broader environmental themes, reminding viewers of the interconnectedness of human and ecological systems. Wheat’s figures dominate their environments but also exist in harmony with them, underscoring the relationship between humans and the earth.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
Wheat has exhibited widely at museums and galleries internationally. She has been the subject of recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; the Brooklyn Museum, and the Aspen Art Museum. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others.
Proceeds from Watering Weeds, 2024 benefit the work of Artadia, a non-profit grantmaking organization and community of visual artists, curators, and patrons. Over two decades, Artadia has worked to foster a more just arts economy and improve the conditions for artists. Since its founding in 1999, it has awarded over $6 million to over 400 artists nationally. We asked Summer Wheat about the new edition and how it relates to her wider practice.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
Your historical ‘non-art’ influences are wide-ranging, Native American weavings, astrology, music videos. What links these inspirations, and inspires you to make something new from them? I think the forms of this world are super interesting, and I try to view them without any kind of judgements, or preconceived notions. I work to keep an open mind in terms of what I’m experiencing. I let myself see the forms from different resources so I can pull together something that links our past, present, and future.
I’m looking in several different corners to pull together an essence that can describe the energy of the moment; some kind of energetic response or representation that could create a feeling of what it’s like to exist in today’s world. We are bombarded by so much information—different ideas, different culture. It’s a lot to sort out.
Summer Wheat working on one of the 30 editions - photography Nir Arieli
Your recent show Fertile Ground featured a number of Watering works, including one that became this edition; can you tell us a little about the concept? I’ve been exploring this theme of a garden for a quite a while. The reason I’m interested in gardens is I’m looking for a location or idea that can be traced back to the ancient past, or early ideas in human history that carry to the present.
Every religious story begins with a garden or relates to a mythical garden as a point of origin. I’ve been thinking about how the garden could be seen as a business, as a story, or as an idea of what you cultivate in the microcosm of yourself.
We are each our own inner garden. In the fountain paintings—Fountains, Watering Weeds, Watering Rocks, I was thinking about this internal garden being expressed externally. It’s a singular figure watering their own garden, so it becomes a self-fulfilling or sustaining garden and depicts a figure watering their own garden space.
There’s a give and take between the figure and the garden itself. The woman’s role as a fountain shows her role in nature as the water source for the garden. The garden grows as it is watered, and both the figure and her setting are responding to each other. We constantly need to be cultivated, nurtured, manicured, fed. It’s coming from this idea of taking care of oneself within this garden or one’s personal sphere and harvesting what you’re sewing.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
You are hand embellishing each of the editions – what attracts you to this process? I like the idea of hand-painting over the same image because this self-sustaining fountain inside the garden has all kinds of things that create chaos. Some of the painted characters interrupt and cause problems or are whimsical additions within the little garden space. I like the idea that there’s a stationary eternal fountain and different elements coming in and changing the landscape from day to day.
Bees come in representing danger, then there are bats, or strawberries. A wide range of things interrupt the stationary figure, but the figure is always engaged in a variety of ideas swarming through her garden. She represents an eternal force that is constantly engaged in both positive and negative experiences—whatever the surroundings bring.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
What were the personal experiences and specific artistic influences that inspired the original work and how did they contribute to its aesthetic? The fountain idea itself was inspired by some recent trips to Europe where there are many fountains. On my walks I would look out for water faucets and public fountains in the cities I traveled to. I felt very connected to them and was struck by the fact that these historic fountains were still supplying cities with water.
In America we don’t have the same history of public drinking fountains where they were once a practical object as well as cultural object of beauty. In European villages there is often a drinking well people can source their water from, and the fountain is a symbol of community, sharing, and life.
For this work they also become symbols for desire and this internal passion, expressing itself through explosive streaming water. Fountains have been architectural anchors for communities and cities, and I found it interesting to personify a fountain and use it as a personal totem. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of it, but it fell on the page. Sometimes the symbols I’m after organically come out during my drawing process. I liked the universal importance and symbolism of water.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
Your paintings challenge accepted ideas around gwomen and work and propose a more utopian world where work-life balance is encouraged. How is that manifested in this particular edition? In this edition the idea of work/life balance is found in how the female fountain is serving the ground she is occupying. The playfulness comes into the different ideas and symbols of each variation. The fountain is the worker. She is forever outpouring, giving, and serving the world around her while the variations change, bringing in a sense of fun spontaneity. This work speaks to that idea of balance between structure and freedom.
Summer Wheat signing one of the 30 editions - photography Nir Arieli
Willem de Kooning and George Seurat are influences – what have they brought to your work over the years? In de Kooning’s work I’m drawn to his sense of physicality, and the kind of background I can recognize in his abstraction. I find the backgrounds very technical. There’s a rigorous understanding of the elements of painting in itself but yet the amount of looseness in his work is partially defined by the tightness.
There’s such control in his brush strokes, it’s the perfect balance between articulation and spontaneity in a visceral composition. I need to feel that way when I’m making a painting. I like having that kind of physical feeling that you would see in a Willem de Kooning, and there are elements in my practice that suggest that feeling.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
With Seurat I’m interested in the other side of the spectrum and ‘pin pointing’ definition through these dots or pixels. Since we live in such a digital world, we’re trying to define things in a series of pixels or other units—that’s how we receive images now.
As I looked at those two artists early on, I wanted to find a combined way of working that would bring both things together. It was an equation that I wanted to solve. If you were to look at the back of my work, it can look like a de Kooning and if you look at the front you see this pixelated texture where the paint extrudes through the screen in individual squares.
This is my way of using both modes of working—having something very defined and built in units, while also having a physical looseness.
SUMMER WHEAT - Watering Weeds, 2024
Three of the 30 editions - photography Garrett Carroll
How do you like to work? With music, in silence, alone or with people around? I like to work with music and silence, alone or around people. It depends on the mood I’m in, or if I feel like I’m blocked or can’t find any images. What I do comes from digital drawings on my iPad, and I’m often working outside of the studio. If I can’t find my way at the studio, I’ll change my scenery by going to a park or a cafe to distract myself from my own thinking.
The less I’m thinking the better, and the more I can tune out the surroundings, the more I’m able to receive the images that organically come and surprise me the most. That’s my goal—to find a way to not be consciously drawing something. If I get to that place I’ve achieved my goal. It’s always revolving. If I feel like I’m working well on something, silence is great, and I don’t need anything to create a mood.
Sometimes I want to celebrate with music. It feels like I’m in a relationship with a baby or a child. Like if you were to ask what do you do with your baby—sometimes you play together to music, sometimes you sit in silence, sometimes you watch TV together. I just respond to the moment I’m in and do what I need to find my way with the work. I listen to what feels right.
Summer Wheat - photography Nir Arieli
You often manipulate paint by pushing it through mesh, essentially a grid, yet the rigid nature of this 'grid' is subverted because how the paint emerges is unregulated. What attracts you to this method of working and how did it start? It’s a long story, but I was essentially trying to find a way to sew with paint. I wanted to figure out a way to create a painting that had a felt experience and give it the kind of rigid structure of geometric abstraction.
The grid as a substrate for the work interested me because I was looking to change the perspective of the materials. The grid was a map on how to find 3 dimensions on a 2-D flat plane, so it made sense to me that the grid was the substrate for my paintings. The grid references the way a painter can render a 3-D space or object in perspective on a 2D surface. That was the architecture for me to find this process.
As the years passed it was about finding the intersections between painting, sculpture, and drawing. I was looking for something that combined all three mediums because I felt that my drawings needed to be sculptural. Through this way of working, the line work in the painting has a very expressive texture compared to the flatter ‘squeegeed’ areas. This method of painting has evolved through a continuous process of me looking and working through the grid to solve these puzzles I set up for myself.
Does it ever become more about process for you than result? I think that I’m always grappling between looking at the process and looking at the result. I’m going back and forth between the two at all times, and I care about them equally. I think the process has to recede at some point so that you can fully experience the work without thinking about the process. The process shouldn’t supersede the final painting or become the most important part of it in the end. The process becomes a second or third note to the experience of viewing it.
My hope is to have someone wonder about how it’s made, but I also want the images and ideas to spark the most interest in people. I’m deeply invested in both sides of making the work, but my biggest concern is the final outcome.
What would you like people to feel when they look at this edition? I think these prints are meaningful in the ways I have described, and most importantly, I want them to be fun! I like that they take you on an adventure and hope they bring an element of surprise. I didn’t know from print-to-print which ideas would come into play, or where each image would lead me when starting the next one. There’s some spontaneity here that, for me, brings a sense of humor and playfulness.
I’m visually influenced by ancient artifacts created by anonymous makers that have a timeless sense of humor or joy. These objects sit in serious museums and are viewed through the scientific lens of archaeology, but they still hold an eternal amusement. In our time today it’s hard to have a sense of humor in art, and it can be hard to find joy when things are so difficult. I’m trying to challenge this serious moment by linking in some humor.
