Steve Wheeler Enter a
feeling, not
a gallery.
Choose a mood and the room itself answers — the light cools or warms, the air changes pace, and only the works that carry that feeling step forward from the dark. Everything else recedes into shadow.
Steve Wheeler
Early Life, Family and Training Steve Wheeler was born Stephen Brosnatch on April 3, 1912, in Slovakia. His early years were defined by migration, as he moved with his family to New Salem, Pennsylvania, as a young boy. Life in Pennsylvania was far from academic. At sixteen, he left school to enter the coalmines, working alongside his father. This period of manual labor provided a stark contrast to the visual world he would eventually i
nhabit, yet it grounded his early existence in the physical realities of industrial labor. His transition from the mines to formal study was driven by a voracious reading habit and a determination to escape the pits. He moved to Chicago to study under his uncle, a commercial illustrator, which provided his first professional exposure to the mechanics of image-making. This training was furthered at the Art Institute of Chicago, where h…