Beate Wheeler
Beate Wheeler was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), in 1932. In 1938, she and her family fled Nazi Germany and arrived at Ellis Island in New York. Until 1945, she attended Manumit, a progressive boarding school in Pawling, New York, that took in refugee children. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1954. She then earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied under the Abstract Expressionist painter Milton Resnick.
In the Bay Area, Wheeler met the sculptor Mark di Suvero, and the two moved to New York’s East Village. There, she joined Patricia Passlof, Elaine de Kooning, and Robert Beauchamp as a founding member of the March Gallery, an artists’ cooperative on East 10th Street that operated from 1958 to 1960. She married the writer and artist Spencer Holst and illustrated several of his books, including Thirteen Essays & Sixty Drawings (1960), On Demons (1970), and Something to Read to Someone (1980). A collection of her drawings, Drawings by Beate Wheeler, was published in 1963.
Wheeler was an early resident of Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life and showed regularly in its gallery. Her work was also exhibited at the National Arts Club, and she sold paintings to private collectors including Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Beate Wheeler died in New York on May 14, 2017, after a fifteen-year illness with Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, her work was included in Hidden Figures: Abstract Expressionist Women Painters in New York and California, 1950s and 60s at David Richard Gallery in New York. The gallery presented her first solo exhibition of paintings, Beate Wheeler: The 1970s: Transition to Color Painting, in 2020, and included her in Painting on the Edges of America Since the 1950s: Five Bay Area Women Painters in 2023. Moss Galleries in Maine presented Beate Wheeler’s Abstract Rhythms: 1960s on 10th Street in 2025, followed by The Paintings of Beate Wheeler at Heather Gaudio Fine Art in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2026.
Sources: David Richard Gallery and Heather Gaudio Fine Art
Beate Wheeler was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), in 1932. In 1938, she and her family fled Nazi Germany and arrived at Ellis Island in New York. Until 1945, she attended Manumit, a progressive boarding school in Pawling, New York, that took in refugee children. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1954. She then earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied under the Abstract Expressionist painter Milton Resnick.
In the Bay Area, Wheeler met the sculptor Mark di Suvero, and the two moved to New York’s East Village. There, she joined Patricia Passlof, Elaine de Kooning, and Robert Beauchamp as a founding member of the March Gallery, an artists’ cooperative on East 10th Street that operated from 1958 to 1960. She married the writer and artist Spencer Holst and illustrated several of his books, including Thirteen Essays & Sixty Drawings (1960), On Demons (1970), and Something to Read to Someone (1980). A collection of her drawings, Drawings by Beate Wheeler, was published in 1963.
Wheeler was an early resident of Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life and showed regularly in its gallery. Her work was also exhibited at the National Arts Club, and she sold paintings to private collectors including Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Beate Wheeler died in New York on May 14, 2017, after a fifteen-year illness with Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, her work was included in Hidden Figures: Abstract Expressionist Women Painters in New York and California, 1950s and 60s at David Richard Gallery in New York. The gallery presented her first solo exhibition of paintings, Beate Wheeler: The 1970s: Transition to Color Painting, in 2020, and included her in Painting on the Edges of America Since the 1950s: Five Bay Area Women Painters in 2023. Moss Galleries in Maine presented Beate Wheeler’s Abstract Rhythms: 1960s on 10th Street in 2025, followed by The Paintings of Beate Wheeler at Heather Gaudio Fine Art in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2026.
Sources: David Richard Gallery and Heather Gaudio Fine Art