Summer Wheat: Blood, Sweat, and Tears

One of the first works on view when entering the exhibition is “Night Garden” (2018), a large-scale work exemplifying how Wheat enlivens patterns with color and texture to create a lush decorative border that also hints at a landscape format.

Summer noted in an interview with BOMB Magazine that, “In Ancient Egypt, gardens were built inside walled compounds and used as places of refuge from the harsh desert climate.”

She sees her tapestry-like works as creating similar space, that “could serve as a place of refuge from the turbulence of the outside world.” Wheat gives focus—like seventeenth century Flemish landscape painting—to how our environment can emulate our state of being.

Just before moving into the next gallery, Wheat continues her exploration of female archetypes as the original hunters, practitioners, and artisans in “Catch and Release” (2018).

The shapes, figures, and fish symbology meld with one another and give her form of abstracted figures an illustrative and otherworldly quality with unquestionable resolve to rewrite historical imagery with the women at the forefront.

To the right of “Beekeepers” is “Dead Tired” (2019), which shows the pink and teal underside of a figure’s shoes. Wheat notes that for her, a true sign of being “dead tired” is when you are too exhausted even to remove your shoes after coming home from a long day.

This work also highlights Wheat’s use of pattern and line—evidence of her exceptional drawing skills—to form the shape of the figure.

The precision of repeated marks on the surface reveal a sense of texture that aligns with woven tapestry, and signature to Wheat’s practice.

“Watermelon Seeds” (2019) is on view next, and like many of Wheat’s paintings, is a thoughtful mashup of art historical, pop cultural, social references.

In this work, the figure’s facial expression of wide eyes and an even wider smile sprinkled with a smattering of seeds, like spots, recall Keith Haring’s “Cruella De Vil” (1984).

This reclining figure is also being nourished by the other women in the composition, pouring seeds into her mouth while others surround her in supportive ways, reinforcing the theme of nurturing communities of women, which appears consistently throughout Wheat’s work.

This painting was also generated from the artist’s recollection of a story, where she heard that if a person puts a seed in their mouth and then plants that seed, it would retain the person’s DNA as it grew.

The breadth of perspectives Wheat’s works engage allows viewers to bring their own ideas into these complexly layered paintings.

In “Midnight Snack” (2019), we see three or four different figures (or possibly the same figure) fixing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the quintessential “midnight snack.”

In his essay for the catalog published in conjunction with this exhibition, Owen Duffy noted that this work “complements the exhibition’s theme of blood, sweat, and tears by depicting a hard-earned moment of rest.”

Here too, Wheat gives focus to the hands and feet of the figure emphasizing the action of labor but also the need to relish moments of respite, renewal, and regeneration.

The presiding theme in the final gallery is water. Each of the paintings reference stories associated with water including swimming, bathing, washing, crying, and even walking on water.

“Dirty Turtles” (2019) shows a very tall woman, the height of six layers of stacked turtles, washing their dirty colorful and patterned turtle shells.

In this work Wheat not only honors the long history of women’s work but for her the imagery reveals something of a personal perspective. In making this work the artist uses the metaphor of the turtle (an animal with a hard shell and a soft body) to describe negotiating with oneself as a woman, when to be “soft” and/or “hard” and what that means personally and universally.

Like the narratives that adorn friezes on Greek vases these various forms of feet with equally varied shoes walk along a mound of stacked waves in “Walking on Water I” and “Walking on Water II” (2019).

We don’t know where they are going but what we can observes in these paintings is that these are all uniquely individual people and they are headed in the same direction, together.

This momentum resonates powerfully with Wheat’s consistent foregrounding of the importance of communities and particularly collectives of women in a nurturing environment.

Directly across from these works is the pair, “Shallow Water I” and “Shallow Water II” (2019), depicting groups of women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and in various garments spending time together in a shallow wading area.

In addition to Wheat emphasizing here the essentials of women supporting one another these works offer an opportunity to observe the artists adept drawing skills (each painting’s composition is modeled after one of the artists drawings).

Wheat uses a wide range of lines, pattern, color, and forms to create an exceptional sense of depth to the space and a creates a fluid movement of the eye around the paintings, effortlessly connecting them though they hang as two distinct works.