Summer McCorkle is an artist whose projects incorporate both still photographs and moving image time-based video installations. She received an MFA in Photography from Hunter College (2012) following a BA in Photography from San Francisco State University (2002). She also studied at the American University of Rome and Rutgers-Mason Gross School of the Arts.

She is a recipient of a New York State Council of the Arts for Film & Media Individual Artists Grant in 2026 Puffin Foundation Grant in 2023 and has attended residencies at Wave Hill, Residency Unlimited, and the AIM Program in New York, Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Montello Foundation in Nevada, Arteles Creative Center in Finland, the Arctic Circle Residency on a ship around Svalbard, Norway, and has been a MacDowell Fellow twice.

Her exhibitions include a solo show at Smack Mellon in New York, and group shows/screenings at The National Portrait Gallery in London, the Hermitage Educational Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill in New York, and the Southern Utah Museum of Art, among other venues in Mexico, Europe, and the US. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York for 20+ years.

“In ‘Western Land Studies’ I use a more traditional documentary image making approach to look at human mark making on our public lands from the effects of tourism, ranching and extractive industries and examine the effects these activities have on land ecology and the idea of wilderness.

I started this project while camping out of a Jeep for seven weeks on the Colorado Plateau, visiting national and state parks and monuments, BLM lands, forest roads, and reservations. In what seemed like vast "wild" landscapes, I understood that the reality is that every inch of this land is spoken for by someone or some entity. The land has a complex history of who owns it, who controls it, what you can do on it, what you can’t do on it, how it was taken, broken up, named, renamed, reallocated, industrialized, monetized, redistributed, protected, saved, and re-wilded.” - Summer McCorkle

“I go places, usually alone, with a camera- still, moving or both- and have the place reveal itself. This sometimes takes on a documentary-ish form which reveals a hidden story or energy enmeshed in the landscape.“
- Summer McCorkle

“These images were made during my time at the Arctic Circle Residency, which is an artist residency that takes place on a tallship that travels around Svalbard, Norway, also known as Spitsbergen, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean about 650 miles from the North Pole. Within these boundaries, lies Pyramiden, a former thriving Soviet mining town, now owned by Russia. The town was abandoned in 1998 and efforts have been made to make it into a tourist destination though this effort seemed to be limping along when we visited. Now ships boycott docking there because of the war in Ukraine as a small protest against Russia. I am always interested in any place like this that contains many layers from wilderness, to industrial utopia, to ghost town, to tourist destination to political symbol. To learn more, read this article by Colin Dickey, a writer and former Arctic Circle alumni.” - Summer McCorkle

To learn more, read this article by Colin Dickey, a writer and former Arctic Circle alumni.

“My projects investigate place, geography, memory, perception, energetics and time and are created by immersing myself in a location and responding to what I find there through lens based image-making.” - Summer McCorkle

“I use location as a defining framework for capturing either a portrait of a person (real of fictional), residual energy from an alleged spiritual encounter or as a backdrop to a projected story that hasn't actually happened.“
- Summer McCorkle

“With all my video pieces, I usually make photographs that accompany them. These can take many forms. For "des abends" I shot these locations on a Mamiya 6x7 so that a mini landscape is formed through a contact sheet of the negative strip as it was shot.” - Summer McCorkle

“Shooting on a medium format camera that uses 120 roll film, I photographed, in chronological order, every place my mother has lived (so far) in Wisconsin.

10 frames, 10 locations. Photography: Me. Art Direction: Mom” - Summer McCorkle