Summer Wheat

Summer Wheat was born in 1977 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She earned a BA from the University of Central Oklahoma in 2000 and an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005. She lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and works from a studio in Brooklyn.

Wheat is known for a technique in which she forces acrylic paint through wire or aluminum mesh, building up woven, textile-like surfaces. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations return repeatedly to scenes of women working together, fishing, foraging, cooking, weaving, using the labor of the body to rework art-historical tropes and craft traditions.

Her career gained momentum with a Triangle Arts Association residency in Brooklyn in 2010 and BRIC Arts Media's Artist of the Month recognition in 2009. She won the New York NADA Artadia Award in 2016 and was named one of Frieze London's "10 Artists to Watch" in 2017, the same year her project "Full Circle" was presented at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. In 2019 she received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. Institutional solo exhibitions have followed at the KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville (2019), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City (2020), and The Mint Museum in Charlotte, where she produced the monumental installation "Foragers" (2021). In 2025 she presented solo exhibitions "No Rain, No Flowers" at Dirimart and "Safety Net" at Andrew Reed Gallery in Miami.

Critical attention has focused on Wheat's process as much as her subject matter. Commentators have repeatedly described her technique of forcing paint through mesh as unusual and technically inventive, and her 2017 inclusion among Frieze London's "10 Artists to Watch" signaled early market and curatorial interest. Museum acquisitions by the Dallas Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, The Mint Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Speed Art Museum point to sustained institutional confidence in her work over the past decade. Discussion of her paintings tends to center on how she uses an unconventional, labor-intensive method to depict labor itself, often figures fishing, foraging, or working in groups, linking process and subject.

Wheat's market runs primarily through her galleries and museum program rather than a deep auction history. She is represented by Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv, and has recent or ongoing relationships with Shulamit Nazarian, SOCO Gallery, and Andrew Edlin Gallery. The highest auction price reported for her work is USD 156,250 for Quilt (Night Version) at Christie's New York on 18 July 2025, according to a single auction-database source that has not been independently corroborated by the auction house or a market-data provider; collectors should treat this figure as provisional rather than a settled record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Wheat, and verification of works currently runs through her representing galleries, including Braverman Gallery, Shulamit Nazarian, SOCO Gallery, and Andrew Edlin Gallery. Her museum presence is well established, but her auction history is thin, with only a single, unverified aggregator-reported result as of this writing, so collectors should treat any single sale result with caution rather than as a settled benchmark. Her market is, at this stage, still primarily a gallery and institutional one.