Call for Entries: Wharton Esherick Museum 27th Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition Wharton Esher­ick Museum

THE CHAL­LENGE

Although the name Wharton Esher­ick is nearly synony­mous with wood, across his career Esher­ick used a wide array of mate­ri­als, like metal and paint, with both inno­va­tion and sensi­tiv­ity. Esherick’s first forays into wood took place while he was primar­ily a painter. Creat­ing patterned frames that comple­mented his paint­ings, Esher­ick began to under­stand how two care­fully chosen mate­ri­als working together create artwork with reso­nance beyond the sum of its parts. His paint­ing Mary (1922) frames an expres­sion­is­tic render­ing of his daugh­ter with wood carved to mirror Esherick’s own brushstrokes.

An inter­est in how wood combines with other mate­ri­als can be seen through­out Esherick’s career. The tightly latticed leather strap­ping on the Hessian Hills Chair (1924) is inti­mately woven around an elegant, atten­u­ated wooden frame, while the thick canvas belting on the Hammer Handle Chair (1938) proves a perfect coun­ter­point for Esherick’s trans­for­ma­tion of ready­made tools into func­tional furni­ture for the Hedgerow Theatre. Wood in conver­sa­tion with aluminum, stone, fiber, and paper can all be found in Esherick’s diverse reper­toire, and even the very archi­tec­ture of Esherick’s home and studio is a bril­liant marriage between wood and other materials.

For the 27th year of the Wharton Esher­ick Museum’s annual juried wood­work­ing exhi­bi­tion, we invite you to share inno­v­a­tive works of art, craft, and design that show­case wood and at least one other medium. Whether func­tional or sculp­tural, each submis­sion should reflect the way Esher­ick worked across a vast spec­trum of mate­ri­als and prac­tices as well as his outside the box thinking.

We want to know how you might complete the phrase ​“wood and…”

Wood and glass? Wood and plastic? Wood and silver? The possi­bil­i­ties are endless!

SELEC­TION

Jurors Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez, Pres­i­dent Emer­i­tus of the North Bennet Street School and Saman­tha deTil­lio, Curator of Collec­tions at the Museum of Arts and Design, along with Emily Zilber, the Wharton Esher­ick Museum’s Direc­tor of Cura­to­r­ial Affairs and Strate­gic Part­ner­ships, will select the final­ists for the exhi­bi­tion from the images submit­ted using a blind jury process. It is strongly recom­mended that you submit high-quality images to ensure the jury sees your piece at its best.

The compe­ti­tion is open to both emerg­ing and estab­lished makers. Entered works should creatively pair wood with at least one other mate­r­ial and be avail­able for the dura­tion of the exhi­bi­tion. Jurors will eval­u­ate the submis­sions based on inven­tive approaches to the prompt, crafts­man­ship and tech­ni­cal profi­ciency, aesthet­ics, and other consid­er­a­tions as deter­mined by the jury.

Dead­line: January 4, 2021