Summer Wheat: Blood Sweat & Tears Catalogue

In Blood, Sweat, and Tears, artist Summer Wheat’s vibrantly colored paintings depict a community of heroic females doing the “heavy lifting and running things.” Using an inventive process of pushing paint through aluminum mesh, Wheat’s large-scale paintings resemble medieval tapestries showing female figures as hunters, fishers, and beekeepers. These women rewrite historical imagery through themes such as labor, discovery, and expressions of joy where traditionally only men were present. This is the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020. 

Foragers, by Summer Wheat, is currently on view at Mint Museum Uptown. This is Wheat's largest project to date (2020) with a monumental 96-panel "stained glass" installation which fills the four story windows in the Robert Haywood Morrison Atrium. This installation, which celebrates traditions of women craft-makers and providers throughout history, electrifies the large atrium space and is a "piece that is animated, that is kinetic, and not static" Mint Museum Chief Curator & Curator of contemporary Art, Jennifer Sudul Edwards, PhD says. 

• Softcover
• Publisher: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020
• Language: English
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 8 x .25 inches
• 72 Color Pages
• Forward written by Sean O'Harrow
• Pulication Manager: Erin Dziedzic
• Editor: Jocelyn Winn
• Designer: Deaths by Coconut
• Printed by Quad Graphics in Woburn, Massachusetts
• Essays by Erin Dziedzic, David Pagel, Anna Stothart, Yael Friedman, Owen Duffy, and Nina Bozicnik