The Wharton Esherick Museum is delighted to team up with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department for an exclusive curator-led walkthrough of the new exhibition Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake and visit to the PMA’s Print Study Center where we’ll look at prints by Esherick and his contemporaries. During the program, we’ll talk with WEM curator Emily Zilber and PMA curators Laurel Garber, Em Dombrovskaya, and Colin Fanning about Wharton Esherick and Wanda Gág’s shared printmaking network and explore the ways that Esherick and Gág’s prints and illustrations were circulated to consumers and the broader public through their shared relationship with the Weyhe Gallery and its manager, Carl Zigrosser.

You might be familiar with Wanda Gág as the author and illustrator of Millions of Cats (1928), the oldest children’s book still in print today. Esherick and Gág were both part of a larger network of early twentieth century printmakers working closely with the Weyhe Gallery and its manager Carl Zigrosser, who would go on to become the first curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The two artists frequently exhibited together at the Weyhe Gallery as well as at Whitney Biennials, the Brooklyn Museum, and other print exhibitions during the ‘20s and ‘30s. Their life and work share common threads such as their participation in the early twentieth-century back-to-the-land movement, their studio practices, interest in capturing scenes of rural life, and their work as illustrators. Their common stories allow us to explore the important role galleries played in an artist’s career and different ways the Weyhe gallery network connected Esherick to other printmakers and potential patrons!

We’ll start the day meeting the curators of the exhibition, Laurel Garber and Em Dombrovskaya, inside the Great Stair Hall of the PMA where they’ll then take us through the show and wrap up the day in the Perelman Building’s Print Study Center. See a map of the PMA here!

Tickets:

$55 per person

$45 for WEM members – Join or renew today to purchase your ticket at this special price!