This month we connected with Jennifer Johnson, WEM’s 2026 Artist-in-Residence. Johnson is a Philadelphia-based sculptor who works primarily in clay with a focus on how architecture reveals lived experience. Over the course of her residency, Johnson has created studies, drawings, and models that respond to her time in Esherick’s Studio.
In our conversation, Johnson shared insights into her practice and updates on her project, set to culminate in an exhibition at WEM this fall.
Before we dive into your residency at WEM, I’d love to hear more about your practice. There’s a clear relationship to architecture in your work, as well as image making, map making, and schematics. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you came to work with clay?
I really am fundamentally a clay artist. I guess I thought I would transition out of it, but I always come back to it. My earliest art education was in high school. I had a very serious art program and an incredible art teacher, Jim Gallagher, who was a really talented ceramicist. I did ceramics every day in high school, which is really odd, you know, but then I went and did an academic degree. From there I had a family and I worked full time.
When my children were leaving home, I went back to The Clay Studio and started taking classes again. Working in clay is so great – anybody can make something they love. You can make a mug, you can make a plate, you can make a vase. I just started making all kinds of weird abstract things. A couple of years after that, I got my own studio. And then, I realized I really wanted more. I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again, so I went back to grad school at Tyler and got my MFA in ceramics. I did almost no ceramics in grad school, but as soon as I got out of grad school I went right back to making ceramics.
I used to only work in porcelain. For years and years, I only worked in porcelain. White porcelain, very little color. Then I discovered this dark clay body, which has really been an inspiration to me. When you paint color on porcelain, it’s a little bit like a violin, it’s kind of shrill. But when you paint on this 266, which is a very dark iron, rich stoneware, it interacts with it and it’s like eating really, really delicious food.
One summer I spent two months just mixing colors on the clay. My wall was covered with test tiles of color. Every time I’m making a batch of mosaics, I’m reworking colors. I have color samples everywhere. I pull them out, and then I go from there. That’s not my end point, that’s my beginning point – the color is the point of it all. It’s an architectural material.
I’ve always been fascinated with architecture from my earliest days in high school. Seriously, the only thing I ever submitted to an art show at that time was a maquette and I won a prize! I make the maquettes in the same spirit as the color, which is to understand how the building fits together. I want to know. I’m not trying to make a model of the building that looks like the building. I’m trying to make a model so I understand the building.
That’s what I did with Wharton Esherick’s Studio, because it went through three transitions. I know what it looks like now. I could measure it. There are really good architectural drawings of it, which I used to make the current model with the dining room and the silo. But there’s two earlier versions; for those, I used old photographs. I was able to work backwards before the silo was there, before the addition was put on over the entrance in 1940.
Same with the workshop with the three hexagons. How do they fit together? How do they interact with the garage and then the garage roof? Modeling that roof! I had no idea how to do it until I found out that the supporting structures were curved. I was able to get that kind of crazy way it looks, where every angle is completely different.
I love how you are talking about your model-making. It sounds really process-driven, that instead of having an endpoint in mind, the process of making is a vehicle for you to gain understanding.
Hopefully somebody looking at it gets some of that information, or thinks, “Oh, that’s why it looks that way.” It becomes a conversation, because you don’t want your work to be something that’s static. You want it to engage people and let them have their own thoughts that you have nothing to do with.
Can you talk a bit about past projects? I know some of your recent projects have included clay mosaic forms, architectural components, and, at times, site-specific installations.
It’s usually a site-specific installation. I did an installation at Crane Arts called the Men’s Room. I knew I was going to make work for the gallery at the Crane. There were these boxes in the space that I realized were covering the urinals. I was like, oh my God, this is the men’s room! I’m showing my work in the men’s bathroom! At the same time, the Kavanaugh hearings were happening, all these women were testifying and no one was believing a thing they were saying. All that angst went into it, and I thought, who cleaned this bathroom? This bathroom’s been here since 1905. Who cleaned this bathroom?
I looked up historical images of cleaning women and made a whole bunch of pieces of women cleaning bathrooms over that period of time, including me. Because I clean bathrooms! I clean bathrooms a lot. I also brought in Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who’s a big New York artist who did a lot of custodial performance art, just to link it to her too. I’m always interested in labor. To me, it’s the thing that makes life worth living. Art is labor. I do a ton of labor. I’m not separate from people who are farming or are cleaning bathrooms. I’m the same.
I did a whole bunch of research on the Crane Company, who was originally in that building. I made a bunch of the buildings, but I also dug into what was behind the buildings. How did the buildings get there? What was the stock structure of the company? I don’t know if it worked, but it seemed like it was a good thing to put in a men’s bathroom. I’ve done projects like that a few other times. I made models of Park Towne Place that were pretty accurate. They had every window and balcony and door, but I also wanted to ask: How did they get there? That land wasn’t always Park Towne Place, so I wanted to look at the historical underpinnings of those buildings.
Coming back to your project at WEM, I know you were doing some research into Esherick as well. We were delighted on staff here when we saw that you had turned up a photo of Esherick’s childhood home, which we hadn’t seen before, as part of your research.
Emily [Zilber] did that! We got the address and realized it was right next to St. Mary’s Church in West Philadelphia. She searched it and his house popped up. It was the most incredible thing.
Has your research played a different role in your process during this residency compared to other experiences? It seems you are driven by the investigation of the objects that are here, the buildings that are here.
I think the forefront of this is just having my physical body in the physical site. I can actually be in the space at different times in the day, different times of year. A big part of the research is my body, the embodied way in which I’m in the space, experiencing the space and the feelings I get from it. But I also Google a lot of stuff! The Studio was built in 1926. Well, that was the 150th anniversary of the country, so there’s a lot of information about what was going on in Philadelphia at the moment. What’s life like for somebody born in the 1880s?
Esherick drew a bad hand, in some sense. In his 20s was World War I. Then there was a little boom with the Roaring Twenties, but then there’s the Depression – which if you’re an artist is naturally going to hit you – and then on into 1945 with World War II. His prime earning years were so disrupted by grand historical events and that played a big part in the type of career he had. Maybe he didn’t get the kind of recognition or monetary success that he might have had otherwise. I don’t think that hurts the production or what we get to see now. If he had that, his studio may have been demolished to build something a lot bigger. We might have been completely different. Maybe this historical moment preserved what we have now in a really sweet way. I think about things like that.
Absolutely. Often it is the absence of something — maybe it’s financial or something else — that forces a certain ingenuity. I’m thinking of something like the Hammer Handle chairs. Since we’re on the topic of Esherick himself for a moment, how familiar were you with his work or with this site before you were invited for the residency?
I first visited for Martha McDonald’s The Wood is Singing in Color performance (WEM AIR 2023). It was an incredibly beautiful fall day and I was just dazzled by it. I had heard about it over the years, I’d been told 50 times, you have to go out to Wharton Esherick’s house. When Roberta Massuch (WEM AIR 2021) got the residency I remember thinking I have to go see it. But that time, around and post Covid, was complicated. So I was familiar, but I was also held back a little bit. So I had heard of Esherick and the Studio, but I hadn’t really ever studied it the way I have now.
You’re a few months into your residency and you’ve been doing all of these observations, studies, and research. Have your expectations of the site or the experience shifted? Are there aspects of the site that have revealed themselves to you or surprised you during your time here?
It’s always wonderful to have a lot of time at a place, because at first you’re seeing things that are known. His Spiral Staircase is known. There are views of that staircase that are known, that feel familiar. They feel like friends. There’s so much more there by getting to spend this amount of time making work, going back and visiting again, making work, going back and visiting again, that back and forth, the to and fro.
WEM has such a phenomenal online set of resources with the Spotlight Talks. Anytime I want to learn about something, like a particular piece, I can go there and get a really incredible lecture and see historical pictures. I’ve used your resources! I haven’t seen every spotlight talk, but I have seen a lot of them and they’re incredible. I have my own observations, I have these professionals talking to me about the piece, and then I get to do something with it.
Can you talk a little bit about the clay “studies” that you made early on in your residency? The pieces are so beautiful; I feel they allow me to see spaces so familiar to me in this refreshed way.
I made those in November because I like to hit the ground running. Every time I go to WEM, I take hundreds of photographs. From those, I try to get to know some of the views. Like that staircase. How does that staircase work? What’s going on there? And the kitchen, the beautiful way the kitchen wraps around from the dining room into the silo. Those were kind of obvious things. I should do these.
Some things were successful. Some things were not very successful. But I start to get a sense, like with the garage – is it the proportions of a regular garage? No, it’s not at all the proportions of a regular garage. The roof is skewed in the front and the back so you get these crazy curves, and then it’s convex and concave. Over time, hopefully, the work will get to have more veracity.
For these studies, I make drawings. I take those drawings, cut them from clay and I fire them, paint them with underglaze, fire them again, and then mortar them together. In that process, I get somewhere and I’m not always happy. I’m much happier right now with the direction that things are going.
I love the rigor with which you are working through your ideas about this space. I know I’m not the only one who thought those were gorgeous studies. The color palette that you found, the way that the space gets compressed, it’s so energetic. There are so many angles already happening in Esherick’s space, so to see those interpreted through your work is great. I really love this idea that the physical geometry is now knowledge you have, and it goes on into the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
Some of it will not be very good, and that’s okay. It puts the emphasis on the making, not on making something good. You never know what you’re going to get, especially with clay. I might think I know what the color is going to be – and I’m pretty good now, I’ve been doing this for three or four years – but I’m often surprised, so that’s interesting.
You mentioned that you’re really excited about the direction things are going now. Can you share more about what you have been up to in the studio?
In January and February I made the models, followed by maybe four other rounds of models. I wood fired the final set at Historic Yellow Springs and they came out really well. I thought I might have to go and do it again, but they’re really good. They’re not perfect or anything, but they’re really interesting wood fire pieces. They’re going to be the center of the show.
When you wood fire, you really have no idea how the work will turn out. I’ve had awful pieces come out before, but these have really kind of primo wood fire effects. They’re really interesting. They’re all different, so that’ll be the centerpiece of the work that I show. I may also show a bunch of mosaics as well, both in the garage and in little spots in the Studio.
So there’s an exploration about the site more broadly, not just our standard exhibition space?
There might be a site specific installation as well. I’m making some demo pieces for that and we’ll see if that works. I’m hoping I can, because I really do like to do a piece that’s in conversation with the architecture in some way. So we’ll see, but I don’t want to distract myself right now from what I’m doing in the studio.
It sounds like you have the sensitivity and the awareness to see if what you’re making is or isn’t working or is or isn’t a finished enough thought before it’s time to invite people to look.
Yeah. I do love site specific installations, that’s my favorite thing. The problem is – what do you do with them when you’re done?
Your interest in site-specific installation connects to the way you’ve talked about getting to know an object, but also knowing the history of the moment that it was built and what was happening in the world. It’s comprehensive in terms of siting something not just in a place, but in a moment and all these other histories.
This is a really similar moment to the 1926 moment because of the way industrialization was turning workers’ lives upside down. We have that right now, and that’s really interesting to me. We have this return to the appeal of the handcraft and the integrity of the handmade object versus something that a machine made that looks so much better than what you could make by hand. There’s that tension right now. We have AI, the simulacra, the substitute.
I think there’s a reinscribing of the significance of Esherick’s work right now. There’s a nostalgia that was built into the Studio, with the reclaimed timbers from the covered bridges and mimicking the 1850 bank barns and its structure, even while he was still building a very modern woodworking studio to make art. He wasn’t feeding milking cows in that barn – he was making the staircase for the Curtis Bok House.
Absolutely. I think you said it beautifully: the relevance of Esherick and his endeavor feels like we’ve come around again at this moment.
Being in the Studio, you feel like you’re talking to him, right? I mean, he’s there. He is there in that Studio. Every monkey hanging from the ceiling, every little latch and light switch plate. He’s everywhere.
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Johnson’s residency will culminate in an exhibition at WEM, opening on October 1, 2026 and on view through December 30, 2026. To learn more about Jennifer Johnson’s work, head to her website jenniferjohnsonclay.com. Johnson will also be joining us on July 11th for our annual summer celebration of Esherick’s birthday. Save the date for the chance to come chat with Jennifer about her work – we’ll have additional details about the event coming soon!
Post written by Deputy Director of Operations and Public Engagement, Katie Wynne
April 2026