The Rituals and Memories That Shape Alexa Wheeler’s Art

This interview, featured on our Arts to Hearts Project website, is a candid conversation with artist Alexa Wheeler. In it, she opens up about her creative journey, what drives her creative process, and how her personal experiences shape her work.

Alexa shares everything from her digital and mixed media background to how she balances making art with teaching and motherhood. She discusses the power of vulnerability, the importance of intuition in her work, and how letting go of perfection has created space for genuine growth.

Through this conversation, we learn about Alexa’s techniques and inspirations, her values, freedom, experimentation, and staying true to herself. It’s a beautiful reminder that art doesn’t have to be one thing; it can be messy, evolving, and deeply personal.

Alexa Wheeler is a featured artist in our book, “101 Art Book: Portrait Edition.” You can explore her journey and the stories of other artists by purchasing the book here: https://shop.artstoheartsproject.com/products/the-creative-process-book

My journey as an artist and educator has been profoundly shaped by my interdisciplinary background in printmaking, electronic art, and multimedia storytelling, as well as my lived experiences. Born in Minnesota, I lived in Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Texas, and Brooklyn before relocating to New Mexico 25 years ago to study at the Tamarind Institute. This decision profoundly transformed my artistic practice. I earned a BFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute, followed by a Master Printer Certificate from Tamarind Institute, and later completed an MFA focusing on Electronic Art at the University of New Mexico. I am a mother, a partner, and a survivor of childhood adversity.

My family is central to my life, and my experiences of love, resilience, and transformation deeply inform my artistic practice. Only recently have I begun integrating certain parts of my history into my identity and creative work, recognising how making has been a means of healing, reclaiming, and fostering connection. Being a woman, an artist, and a survivor has shaped my work, not just as a form of expression, but as a way to bear witness and create space for shared narratives of strength. As a Master Printer, I have collaborated with artists worldwide in renowned studios such as Tamarind Institute, Pyramid Atlantic Press, Jean-Yves Noble Serigraphy, Flatbed Press, and PaperPress in Germany, reinforcing the intensely collaborative nature of my work.

This spirit of exchange and mentorship continues in my role as a Principal Lecturer III in Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico–Valencia, where I have taught since 2008. I love teaching, and I believe every student’s story is essential. My classroom is a space where students are encouraged to explore their narratives, develop their voices, and recognise the power of their lived experiences in shaping their creative practice.

1.  Your work often explores the idea of women as vessels—holding, nourishing, and bearing weight. How has this theme evolved for you, especially as a mother and educator?  

The idea of women as vessels didn’t start as poetic for me—it came from a place of pain. I began thinking of my body as a vessel when I entered deep personal therapy to heal from childhood sexual abuse. I started to realise that I had internalised the idea of my body as something that existed to hold the desires and consequences of others, specifically, as a container for men’s pleasure, with no voice or agency of my own. That was the raw, honest place where the vessel metaphor began. Over time, through art-making, motherhood, and teaching, that idea began to shift.

I started to reclaim the vessel—not as a site of violation, but as a space of strength, creativity, and transformation. I began to see the vessel as something sacred, capable of holding complexity, memory, and care for others and myself. Now, my work explores the duality of being a vessel: how women carry trauma, tenderness, and everything in between. As an educator, I hold space for students to explore their identities, and as a mother, I continue to learn how to nourish without losing myself. My art reflects this evolution. It honours the weight we carry—but it also celebrates the beauty of surviving, transforming, and choosing what we hold and release.

I stopped making art to please others, and that’s when everything changed. I started creating from a place of intuition, and it finally felt like me.

Alexa Wheeler

2.    You talk about play, discovery, and interaction in your art. How do you approach inviting viewers into that space, particularly when working with heavy or emotionally charged themes?  

Honestly, this is something I continue to struggle with. I don’t want to post signs that say “Take this” or “Add your voice here.” I want the work to hold space and offer enough visually, emotionally, and atmospherically cues for the viewer to feel invited in without being directed. That’s a hard line to walk. In the past, I’ve asked friends or family to engage with the piece during an opening to model the interaction, or I’ve acted out the role myself. But I’ve always taken those moments as indicators that the work isn’t quite there yet—that the invitation isn’t embedded deeply enough in the piece. Still, I’ve had moments where it has worked—moments when people entered the piece, touched it, took something, or left something, without being told.

That kind of voluntary interaction keeps me going. I think we all have play in us—it’s just that survival, responsibility, and trauma often bury it. When I create, I try to tap into that instinctive curiosity and joy, even when the themes are heavy. I’ve learned a great deal from children—my own, especially. Kids don’t need permission to imagine, to touch, to invent. They move through the world open and experimental, as long as they feel safe. That’s the spirit I try to evoke: a space where it feels secure enough to explore. I think of comedians often—they handle the heaviest material through humour, which makes it hit even deeper. I try to do the same. Humour disarms. Play reopens the body. And when those things meet grief or trauma, we’re more open to feeling, connecting, and perhaps even healing.

3. You’ve lived in so many places—Minnesota to Brooklyn to New Mexico. How have these transitions influenced your creative process and relationship to objects and memory?

Absolutely. I moved so much growing up that all I had were objects. I don’t have childhood friends, but I sometimes grieve that, especially when I see people still connected to classmates from elementary school. But I did have my siblings. The four of us became each other’s safe place. We saved things—small, seemingly insignificant objects—because memory didn’t live in relationships; it lived in things. I also have very few memories of childhood due to childhood sexual trauma. Through therapy, I’ve come to understand how deeply I dissociated to survive.

Even now, memory feels like something outside of me, held in environments, textures, and artefacts. My art often serves to build memory, creating counter-narratives that fill the gaps left by pain and absence. I find myself making new memories through the act of making—constructing the childhood I didn’t have, piece by piece. New Mexico is the place I’ve lived the longest, by far. When people ask where I’m from, I say New Mexico. It’s where my life has rooted, I’ve raised my children, and most of my available memories now live. Seeing the world through my children’s eyes—their friendships, their stability—has helped me reimagine what it means to feel safe, to belong, to remember.

My work used to come from a place of survival—anger, grief, and fear. It still holds those truths, but now it starts from joy, curiosity, and pleasure. That shift has been one of the most healing parts of my practice. I no longer make work to survive—I make it to connect, celebrate, and offer something beautiful to the world.

4. Printmaking and darkroom photography require significant time and care. What draws you to these slower processes in a world that often values speed and immediacy?  

I need literal, physical time to process who I am, how I feel, what I want, and what I remember. Printmaking and darkroom photography give me that time. They’re slow, deliberate, and full of ritual. And that slowness isn’t just about the work—it’s about me. These processes enable me to reconnect with myself, piece by piece. For me, the art is often not the final product—it’s the experience of making. The finished work becomes an artefact of that process. When I look at something I’ve made, I don’t just see the image or composition—I remember what I felt that day in the studio, in the darkroom, with the press or the enlarger.

I remember how it felt to move. Because making reminds me I have a body. I spent much of my life disconnected from my body, dissociating to survive trauma. These slow, physical practices root me in the present. Turning the crank of the press, setting the height of the enlarger, folding the paper—these small gestures reawaken my body to itself. They say, “You’re here. You made this. With your hands, your muscles, your heart.” In a world that demands speed, these slower practices give me a safe, structured, and sacred space. They help me remember that I have a body and can trust it, listen to it, and create from it.

Art, for me, is a space where I can be free—free to explore, to mess up, to play, and to grow without judgment.

Alexa Wheeler

5. You’ve mentioned integrating parts of your past into your work more recently. What does that journey of healing and reclaiming through art look like for you?

For a long time, I didn’t—or maybe couldn’t—make work directly about my past. The trauma was there, under the surface, guiding my choices, my aesthetics, my materials. But it wasn’t spoken. I created to survive, to cope, to find a private outlet for the things I couldn’t say out loud. The work held the pain, but I didn’t yet know how to keep it myself. In the last few years, something shifted. Through deep therapy and personal growth, I’ve begun to consciously integrate parts of my past—especially my experiences with childhood sexual abuse—into my work.

It hasn’t been easy. But bringing those narratives into the light has made the work more honest and more connected to others. It’s no longer just about processing my emotions alone. It’s about creating something that might resonate with someone else and hold space for their story. Healing through art isn’t linear. It’s messy, uncomfortable, sometimes beautiful. It appears to be stitching fragments back together. It seems to be printing on napkins, towels, and garments—the overlooked, the functional, the worn. It looks like trying to turn silence into voice, grief into gesture, memory into form. And sometimes, it seems like laughing at the absurdity of it all, finding play where there was only pain once. Art has given me the language to reclaim what was taken, and more importantly, to rewrite what comes next.

6. As an educator, you nurture others’ voices every day. How has teaching shaped your practice, and what do you hope your students carry with them after working with you?

Teaching has completely reshaped my perspective on art, not just as an object, but as a practice of listening, questioning, and becoming. In the classroom, I see students learning to trust their stories, experiment without fear, and find language for things they didn’t know could be said aloud. Watching them take risks reminds me to keep doing the same in my work. I often tell my students that what they create matters because they made it themselves. That their lived experience is a valid source material.

That art doesn’t have to be polished or perfect—it must be true. That lesson has bounced back into my studio more than I can count. What I hope students carry with them isn’t just technique—it’s the belief that their voice is enough. That they’re allowed to take up space. Their work, like their lives, will shift and deepen with time. I want them to feel that making art builds self-trust, self-recognition, and healing. Teaching gives me purpose. It’s an extension of my art practice—another form of holding, witnessing, and co-creating. When I help someone see themselves more clearly through their creations reminds me of why I make art in the first place.

At its core, Alexa Wheeler’s art is about freedom—creative freedom, personal freedom, and the courage to venture into the unknown. Through layers, textures, and digital experimentation, she invites us into a space where rules can be broken and intuition can lead. Her work reminds us that art is not about perfection but presence, play, and possibility. From this conversation, we’ve learned that trusting your instincts, following your truth, and allowing space for growth can lead to the most authentic and meaningful creations. To learn more about Alexa, click the following links to visit her profile.

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