Increasing the custom of artist-designed “chapels”, the American artist Summer season Wheat has been commissioned to create a $3m shrine-like enclosure on the Kansas Metropolis Museum in Missouri. JewelHouse shall be housed inside a transformed Beaux Arts constructing on the museum’s campus that final functioned as a planetarium earlier than it was deserted within the Seventies. The roughly 600 sq. ft architectural intervention will characteristic a kaleidoscopic association of stained glass components and sculptures with cosmic motifs—together with references to the Water Bearer, an Aquarian determine recurrent within the artist’s work that symbolises therapeutic and cleaning.
Wheat, greatest generally known as a painter, labored with Mary Kemper Wolf, the chair of the Kemper Museum of Modern Artwork in Kansas Metropolis, to conceive of the challenge following Wheat’s 2020 solo exhibition on the museum, Blood, Sweat and Tears—curtailed as a result of coronavirus outbreak.
“We considered translate my work right into a public artwork challenge, or one thing that somebody may bodily expertise,” Wheat says. “These conversations began through the pandemic, so we thought-about the truth that we might have endured a number of years of turmoil each time this piece have been to return to fruition. With the present local weather, there’s much more turmoil that we’re coping with as folks. I needed this house to symbolise an entry level into purification. I would love for this web site to be a refuge for individuals who need to discover a secure house to look inside, to recognise their variations and to have an area for meditation and contemplation.”
Rendering of Summer season Wheat’s JewelHouse (inside). Architectural design by Worldwide Architects Atelier Courtesy the Kansas Metropolis Museum
Wheat will collaborate with the artist Tyler Kimball to create the stained glass components, and with Worldwide Architects Atelier (IAA), a Kansas Metropolis-based agency that has labored on different cultural initiatives within the area, to finish the work. Much like the Rothko Chapel and Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, JewelHouse shall be activated with steady community-minded public programmes and performances.
“Artwork and meditation and contemplation will come collectively for folks to think about their lives and communities in deeper methods,” Wheat says. “We don’t need to essentially name it a ‘chapel’, as a result of we don’t need non secular connotations related to the work. We need to present folks with an area to discover their interior world.”
