Written by Alexa Wheeler. Edited by Karin Luner
Alexa Wheeler is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and master printer whose work examines care, labor, memory, and the ways personal and collective histories are carried through objects, images, and inherited traditions. Working across printmaking, textiles, photography, artist books, installation, sound, and digital media, she combines silkscreen, monoprint, embroidery, sewing, collage, engraving, transfer processes, and found materials to create layered works that transform everyday domestic artifacts into repositories of memory. Raised between the United States and Germany, Wheeler draws upon family history, migration, feminist thought, and material culture to explore themes of inheritance, identity, belonging, and resilience.
Wheeler is Principal Lecturer III in Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico–Valencia, where she teaches printmaking, photography, electronic art, and more while directing the campus makerspace. She is the recipient of a 2026 ARC Gallery Athena Fund Solo Show Award and a 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation/516 ARTS Fulcrum Fund grant. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she continues to develop projects that blend traditional craft, contemporary technology, and community participation to create spaces for storytelling, connection, and collective remembrance.
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FEATURED IMAGE:
kith, kin + smoke trails – monoprint, transfer, sewing, collage, embroidery, oil pastel, collage plates, screws, wire, sound,
55″ x 144″ x 6″ (photo credit: Aziza Murray)
kept & carried: ordinary objects, extraordinary histories
This September, I am honored to present kept & carried, my solo exhibition as a 2026 Athena Fund Solo Show Award recipient at ARC Gallery in Chicago. The exhibition brings together printmaking, textiles, photography, artist books, sound, and participatory installation to explore how care is inherited, performed, and remembered through the ordinary objects and rituals of domestic life.
For many years, my work has centered on the quiet evidence of everyday existence. I am drawn to the objects that often escape historical record: a hand-stitched textile, a worn wooden spoon, a preservation jar, a family photograph, a handwritten recipe, or a basket passed from one generation to the next. These domestic artifacts carry more than utility; they hold stories of labor, love, migration, grief, resilience, and survival.
180″ x 115″ (photo credit: Aziza Murray)
kept & carried draws from family photographs, German folk traditions, household vessels, and stories gathered through community participation. Together, they consider the labor historically assigned to women: preserving, nourishing, mending, witnessing, and carrying memory forward. While these acts have often been dismissed as ordinary or invisible, they are foundational to families, communities, and culture itself.
My practice moves fluidly between printmaking, textiles, photography, embroidery, sewing, collage, and found materials. I think of these processes as forms of accumulation. Layers of translucent fabric, stitched repairs, repeated printed images, and transferred photographs allow histories to overlap rather than remain fixed in time. Each material carries its own language, and together they become an evolving archive where personal histories intersect with collective experience.
Throughout the exhibition, architectural forms, fences, jars, utensils, suspended threads, and vessels appear repeatedly. These recurring forms become metaphors for protection, containment, connection, and resilience. They ask what we choose to preserve, what we inherit without choice, and how memory is carried through both objects and bodies.
gefäße kartenlegung 11 (left), gefäße kartenlegung 12 (right) – silkscreen, engraving, monoprint, transfer, sewing,
embroidery, collage, 34″ x 12″ (plus hanging spoons)
A central component of the exhibition is witness, an ongoing participatory project that invites visitors to share stories connected to objects they have kept or carried throughout their lives. These audio recordings become part of the installation itself, extending the work beyond autobiography into a growing community archive. Every contribution acknowledges that memory is not created in isolation but through relationships, shared experiences, and collective acts of care.
Receiving the Athena Fund Solo Show Award from ARC Gallery is particularly meaningful because of the gallery’s longstanding commitment to feminist artistic practice. Feminist artists have long challenged the boundaries between public and private life, insisting that domestic labor, caregiving, and personal histories deserve visibility within contemporary art. kept & carried continues that conversation by treating the ordinary not as mundane, but as profound.
recorded audio stories, 18″ x 18″ x 36″
Ultimately, this exhibition asks how acts of care become records of belonging that endure across generations. I hope visitors leave with a renewed awareness of the objects that surround them every day - not simply as possessions, but as witnesses to the lives we build, the people we love, and the histories we continue to carry forward.
Visit her show at ARC Gallery, www.arcgallery.org/exhibitions-archive/alexa-wheeler
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4, 2026, 5-8pm
1463 West Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60642
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