Welcome home, Steve features a group of intricately rendered works on canvas from the 1960's by artist Steve Wheeler (1912-1992).

This exhibition is titled Welcome Home, Steve, because the paintings on view were created in the very same NYC apartment that Steve Wheeler lived, painted, and passed away in in 1992.

The artworks will be on view by appointment only before traveling to Montanaro Fine Art's Newport, Rhode Island gallery this Spring.

Steve Wheeler is the leading artist associated with the Indian Space Painters, an informal group active in New York during the late 1940's. Although he did not exhibit with the group, Wheeler is commonly considered to be a progenitor of the Indian Space style, the Native American-inspired integration of organic and geometric pictographic forms within a flat, seamless space.

In Laughing boy rolling, Wheeler assimilates elements from Cubism and Surrealism, as well as Inuit, Peruvian, and Northwest Coast Indian cultures, to magically transform the commonplace image of a boy rolling a hoop. The title may refer to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Oliver La Farge, Laughing boy (1929), about Navajo life and culture, in which the main character finds that his past and present come together to make him whole.

Similarly, Wheeler synthesizes past, present, and future in his complex, linear, non-illusionistic paintings and works on paper. Furthermore, he symbolizes his subjects' thoughts, memories, and dreams in his multi-dimensional abstractions.'

(Text by Gail Stavitsky. Montclair Art Museum)