Wendy Means is a contemporary surrealist painter who works from the premise that reality is larger than what we can currently measure — that the connections between all living things, across time, matter, and consciousness, follow patterns that science, metaphysics, and nature have each arrived at independently.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, of African American, Ashkenazi, and mixed heritage, she demonstrated exceptional range from the start — winning Artist of the Year in her high school graduating class of nearly 1,000 and earning scholarship offers to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, and Carnegie Mellon University's engineering program. She attended SAIC and later Columbia College Chicago to study Interactive Multimedia before disability interrupted her formal studies.
After more than a quarter century away from art, Means returned with a body of work born from survival, self-determination, and her innate ability to identify structure within both concrete and abstract systems. Her paintings are technically precise and emotionally immediate — bold, saturated color against dark grounds, figures and animals rendered with unflinching detail and placed in liminal environments where the viewer becomes a participant. Whether depicting a single subject caught between realities or constructing an immersive space the viewer enters alone, her work moves between the corporal, the rational, and the ethereal.
Her work has been exhibited at The Ritz Theater and Museum, FSCJ Kent Gallery, and venues in Cleveland, Atlanta, and Detroit. In 2022 she held a solo exhibition at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Jacksonville. She is a recurring contributor to the "(a) river rising" anthology series, and has been featured in Canvas Rebel, Voyage MIA, Camp Elasticity, and The Contrast Project. Her work is available through 33 Contemporary Gallery on Artsy and at wendevious.com.
She currently lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.