Artist Highlight: Zoe Schweiger
Photography by Pedro Wazzan, 2025.
Meet Bakehouse resident Zoe Schweiger, a painter whose work channels a sense of urgency through fluid, blurred forms that echo her queer experience and the environmental precarity of our time. Her paintings delve into intimate moments between loved ones, rendered in a warm, saturated palette that evokes Miami’s heavy humidity, persistent flooding, and sweltering heat. By abstracting the figure, Zoe mirrors how rain and water can obscure reality— much like the broader forces that shape our lives beyond our control. Her practice interweaves the looming realities of climate change in South Florida with the strength and tenderness of a resilient queer community.
Can you tell us about your artistic practice?
I paint with a sense of urgency, distorting and blurring my subjects, mirroring the fluidity of my queer experience in a world increasingly defined by rising temperatures and environmental fragility. I delve into intimate moments between loved ones with a warm, saturated color palette. The people in my paintings are often depicted in everyday poses despite being engulfed in swirling red and green waters. The abstraction of my figures evokes the heavy humidity, persistent flooding, and sweltering heat that saturate Miami. Through this, I aim to reflect how rain and water blur and obfuscate reality, reflecting how forces beyond my control shape my lived experience. My practice has evolved into a means of interweaving this urgency of climate change looming over South Florida and the resilience of my beloved queer community.
Tell us about a personal artistic project or body of work that you are currently excited about.
Lately I've been expanding on my current body of work by painting larger and more lively scenes of the people in my life. I'm super excited to paint on some bigger surfaces and also to allow my paintings to have some more dynamic compositions outside of the portraiture I like to do. I also have some new subjects for these pieces that I think will change up the vibe a bit - since I've been very attached to painting the same group of people for the last year or so.
Why are you excited to be joining the Bakehouse community?
Working at Bakehouse everyday has been such a wonderful experience. I love to paint alone but I also dont love to be isolated so having a studio here has made me feel a lot more in community with my peers. My studio is also sandwiched in between artists that I really admire and being in conversation with those artists has not only made me feel more connected but has helped my practice grow. Also! I've been coming to Bakehouse since I was a kid and was probably around 10 years old the first time I visited an artist's studio here, it feels so surreal to now be a practicing artist in this space and to be a part of this community.