About Us
The Wharton Esherick Museum is the home and studio of famed American artist Wharton Esherick, located atop Valley Forge Mountain in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Set on 12 wooded acres, the Museum campus is comprised of multiple buildings including Wharton Esherick’s Studio, which is now the centerpiece of the Museum.
The Wharton Esherick Museum is a proud member of the Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios.
Mission
WEM is a catalyst for creative action. We provide transformative experiences through the preservation of and public engagement with the Esherick campus, art collection, and archive.
Vision
It is our vision for every person to experience Wharton Esherick’s dynamic creativity. Our ambitious campus plan is a blueprint for developing the opportunities inherent in our campus: education, accessibility, outreach, and collaborations among colleagues and artists, all of which support our institutional viability and growth.
Values
- We believe that the experience of Esherick’s built environment allows visitors to engage with the artist’s ideas with an unparalleled level of intimacy.
- In keeping with Esherick’s own creative path, we value thinking through making and the grounding nature of working directly with materials for audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities.
- We welcome new perspectives and diverse voices to complicate and expand our understanding of Esherick’s legacy today, and seek collaborations that allow for institutional growth and learning.
- We approach our programming and interpretation with creative reinvention, experimentation, and a commitment to transparency, and seek to develop new models for how an historic artist’s home can be relevant to contemporary audiences.
- We believe in preserving, to the highest standards, Esherick’s architecture and the collections on our campus as well as the spirit of the site.
- We aim to promote scholarship on Esherick and American art by making our collections and archives accessible to researchers.
- We respect labor in all its manifestations. As we elevate the work of Wharton Esherick and his collaborators, so do we value the contributions and dedication to preserving and sharing Esherick’s story of our staff, volunteers, contractors, community, and visiting scholars and artists.
- Everyone is welcome at WEM. We are committed to making the collections, buildings, and programs as accessible as possible, and to building avenues towards equity and inclusion.
History of the Museum
About Wharton Esherick
Wharton Esherick (1887 – 1970) was an internationally significant figure in the landscape of art history and American modern design. As a sculptor, Esherick worked primarily in wood and extended his unique forms to furniture, furnishings, interiors, buildings, and more. His motto, “If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing,” is evident in the joyful expression of his work. Now recognized as a leader of the studio furniture movement, Esherick saw himself as an artist, not a craftsman, and his concern was with form, not technique. He pursued his artistic vision in forms that might turn to furniture or other sculptural furnishings. More importantly, these were but one aspect of his art complemented by the paintings, prints, drawings, poetry, and sculpture he also created.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Esherick studied drawing and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. At the height of American Impressionism he and his wife, Letty, joined the flight of painters from the city to the countryside. They settled in an old farmhouse near semi-rural Paoli – with enough level land to grow their own food in the event the paintings didn’t sell.
His interest in wood began in 1920 with the carving of simple representational designs on frames for his paintings. This led to carving woodcuts – some 350 blocks and nine illustrated books – and carving on furniture. In the early 1920s he began sculpting in wood, then considered solely a craft medium. Gravitating towards direct carving and interior furnishings, Esherick had begun his lifelong exploration of the nature of wood and its dynamic material quality. By 1926 his sculpture was being exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and he turned to the construction, the expression in space, of his Studio.
Spanning the 50-year period from 1920 until his death in 1970, Esherick evolved from the organic forms of the Arts and Crafts period, through the sharp-edged crystalline shapes of Expressionism, to the curvilinear free-forms for which he is best known. He created furniture that would pass as sculpture, and sculpture that functioned as furniture, bridging the gap between art and craft. He welcomed commissions for one-of-a-kind furniture and interiors, not just for the income, but for the joy of creating new, exciting forms for everyday uses and developed long-lasting relationships with dedicated patrons along the way.
In 1940, Esherick presented a room of his work and furnishings at the New York World’s Fair, his first major exhibition. During his lifetime, Esherick was also honored with a Gold Medal from the New York Architectural League and, in 1958, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York (now the Museum of Arts and Design) held a major retrospective of his work. In 1972, not long after his passing, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. featured many Esherick pieces in the exhibition Woodenworks, introducing his work to a new generation of artists.
