Summer Wheat’s “Foragers” on “In Vivid Color” group exhibition

To celebrate Mint Museum Uptown’s tenth anniversary, “In Vivid Color”: Pushing the Boundaries of Perception in Contemporary Art brings together four innovative contemporary artists, including Summer Wheat—who create works celebrating the power of color and its transformative ability to permeate the space around us. Their work is juxtaposed with a selection of paintings and works on paper drawn primarily from The Mint Museum’s permanent collection that explore artists’ exploration of color in more traditional ways.

The exhibition uses color as an opportunity to investigate how people perceive a non-fixed reality: the ever-shifting environment in which we must discern the real from the illusionary. The installations by Wheat, Finch, Colon, and Steinkamp are highly experiential, creating an environment that will engage each viewer uniquely, determined by the personal nature of color perception. Despite this subjective element, audiences experience the immersive installations simultaneously, fostering a sense of communion: we are united while remaining apart. This dichotomy replicates the sensation many feel as the COVID-19 pandemic requires much of our human contact to be mediated by technology, the media used by Colon, Finch, and Steinkamp.

Brooklyn-based artist Summer Wheat’s “Foragers” is a monumental work of art spanning four stories and 3,720 square feet in Mint Museum Uptown’s Robert Haywood Morrison Atrium. A myriad of vibrant panels that give the illusion of stained glass fill the atrium’s 96 windows and weave a story of women who labor to build the communities that form the spine of modern society.

“In so many ways, Foragers is a monumental tribute to all those anonymous female makers and laborers who have made North Carolina the place that it is today: the Catawba clay workers, the Cherokee basket makers, the enslaved and freed African-American fishers and farmers, the countless woodworkers, weavers, and quilters,” says Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD, the Mint’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art.