The Future (and past) is Female: Summer Wheat’s whimsical, often tongue-in-cheek tableaux in rich jewel tones punctuated with bright neons, teem with fantastical figures that memorialize tribes of women hunting, collaborating, celebrating, and ultimately replacing millennia of images of male rulers and warriors. Summer Wheat’s unique formative experiences with art growing up in Oklahoma were shaped by the aesthetic and conceptual drive of Native American art and Indigenous culture. Bridging those early influences with the canon of Western art (from ancient art to medieval tapestries) and popular references such as astrology and comic books, the artist’s work centers female archetypes in her expansive practice of painting, sculpture, and large-scale installation. For the artist’s first monograph, curator Jennifer Sudul Edwards discusses the wide range of subjects that inform Wheat’s work, including the artist’s interest in alchemy. Curator Anne Ellegood in conversation with the artist discusses Wheat’s sculptural work, large-scale installations, and first foray into building a freestanding architectural space. Jennifer Krasinski explores Wheat’s unique approach to painting; her impressive wall works resemble a cross between intricate beadwork and the pixel-like structure of a digital image.

Over a brief, twelve-year career, the Iranian director and playwright Reza Abdoh broke all of the conventions of American theater, pushing actors and audiences past their limits to create hallucinatory, at times nightmarish, dreamscapes shot through with humor, song, and an unlikely spirituality. His productions addressed the bitter political realities of his time- the systemic devaluation of black life, governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis, sexual repression, genocide in Europe, and war in the Middle East-with harrowing eloquence. Just before his death he ordered that his plays should never be performed again. Profusely illustrated, the catalogue contains new essays on the influence and reception of Abdoh's works in theater, film, and video, published and unpublished interviews with the director, and conversations with his friends and colleagues, as well as scripts of his plays and contemporary reviews.