Wharton Esherick Museum - 32nd Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition

The year 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of a pivotal moment for the Wharton Esherick Museum that required both literal and symbolic groundbreaking. In 1926, Esherick completed the first phase of construction on his Studio, the space that introduced his distinctive architectural and artistic vision to the built environment and demonstrated his investment in himself as not only a painter but also a builder of worlds. The Studio is a deeply personal space—one that Esherick himself called an “autobiography in three dimensions”—and naturally reflects breaks in the aesthetic and ideological ground that allowed him to reshape his creative career. For WEM’s Thirty-Second Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition, Breaking Ground, we invite contemporary artists to take inspiration from what they consider groundbreaking, defined by any of the term’s multiple meanings.

With this prompt, we encour­age appli­cants to think broadly about the theme. We hope you will submit entries across a wide spec­trum…