Alexa Wheeler

Alexa Wheeler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans printmaking, textiles, photography, video, installation, and mixed media. Her practice examines how everyday objects carry memory, labor, and emotional history. She approaches making as a method of survival and reclamation—an active process of naming and reshaping what has been inherited, both visibly and in silence.

Trained as a Master Printer at the Tamarind Institute, Wheeler works through the material logics of transfer, pressure, repetition, and surface. Printmaking shapes her philosophy: nothing is singular, everything bears an impression, and all materials hold history. Moving between copper etching, screenprinting, stitching, collage, photography, and video, she collapses boundaries between analog craft and digital technology. Rather than purity, she seeks friction, translation, and layered truths.

Domestic objects—towels, utensils, vessels, quilts, picket fences—are recurring collaborators in her work. These are not sentimental symbols but active sites of memory and power. They hold the residue of care, the weight of expectation, and the quiet architecture of resilience. Through recent series exploring the idea of women as vessels, Wheeler examines the emotional cost of holding—history, silence, and survival—and its generational impact: grief, inheritance, hunger, devotion, transformation, hope.

She is the founder of toastlab (Together | Observe | Acknowledge | Share | Transform), a feminist mobile makerspace that brings printmaking, sewing, and digital fabrication to women and survivors outside institutional access. Her community work is grounded in material empowerment—building pathways to authorship and empathy through making.

Wheeler holds an MFA in Electronic Art from the University of New Mexico, a Master Printer Certificate from the Tamarind Institute, and a BFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute. She is a 2025 Fulcrum Fund awardee (a grant through 516 ARTS supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation), a 2026 True Inspiration Artist-in-Residence at Furman University, and a 2026 Vermont Studio Center resident. Her upcoming solo exhibition will open at Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in May 2026. She is a long-time faculty member at the University of New Mexico–Valencia, where she serves as Principal Lecturer III in Fine Arts. She works in the space between memory and transformation, where making becomes a way to survive, reclaim, and connect.