| Natasha Wheat | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Natasha Rose Wheat |
| Born | October 25, 1981 Los Angeles, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance |
| Training | School of the Art Institute of Chicago, |
Natasha Wheat is an internationally exhibiting interdisciplinary, socially engaged artist who lives and works in the United States.[1]
Her works have been described as situational constructions,[2] often using "food to transform her audience into co-participants in the work".[3]
She recently performed a Claire Fontaine text work, singing it as Rock n' Roll in an event at The Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco.
In her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, entitled Self Contained, Wheat constructed a temporary restaurant within the exhibition space of the Museum, and collaborated with chefs from underground supper clubs to create conceptual meals that included the tastes of Salty, Sour, Bitter, Numbing and Sweet. She produced a series of artists books for this exhibition that people were able to read while they were visiting to the space. Visitors could also sit on sculptural seating made from orange crates and agricultural waste.
Wheat is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been interviewed by The Examiner, Art Practical,[4] Bad at Sports,[5] The Oregonian,[6] and a number of other online periodicals.[7]
She is the founder of Portland, Oregon based arts and urban farming project, Project Grow, an arts atelier for people with disabilities at the site of a factory.[8] It began in 2008 as an intervention into sweatshop type labor at a factory where the people with disabilities were working.
Wheat's longtime boyfriend is artist Jim Fairchild.[9]
She is a first generation American, with a mother from Panama, whom she described in an interview as "a folk artist who...was homeless in Los Angeles" while she was growing up.