Breaking Ground: WEM’s 32nd Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition

Wharton Esherick Museum
Malvern, Pennsylvania
June 18, 2026–September 20, 2026

For Breaking Ground, WEM’s 32nd annual juried woodworking exhibition, we invited contemporary artists to take inspiration from what they consider groundbreaking, defined by any of the term’s multiple meanings. How does Wharton Esherick’s life and work seem groundbreaking in 2026 and how might this be interpreted through their practice? Whether public or personal, what ideas or shifts feel groundbreaking in this complex moment in history?

The artworks in this exhibition encourage us to consider what becomes possible when we embrace acts of breaking ground in our own lives. How might we loosen what feels settled, disrupt familiar patterns, act boldly in a world that seems to have seen everything, or imagine what might take shape once the soil has been turned? Both Wharton Esherick and the artists featured here remind us that knowing when and how to break ground requires attentiveness to the world around us, as well as to the internal impulses that signal it is time to begin building something new.