From the Vault: Rarely Seen Works from the Museum’s Permanent Collection

March 6 – 22, 2026

Curators: Amrut Mishra and Jennifer-Navva Milliken

The Museum for Art in Wood’s permanent collection numbers some 1,400 artworks. Charting the field’s development from the late 1970s to the present, it offers an expansive view into the creative pursuits of artists, craftspeople, and designers working in wood.

The Museum is committed to making this treasury accessible both onsite and through its online database, Smartify platform, and event programming. Yet the breadth of the collection exceeds the Museum’s physical footprint, and many works necessarily spend time in storage, out of public view.

From the Vault: Rarely Seen Works from the Museum’s Permanent Collection offers a special opportunity to view these holdings. Spanning wood-turned vessels, large-scale sculpture, studio furniture, and works on paper, the exhibition highlights the remarkable range of scale, approach, and material exploration represented in the collection. While considerations such as size or complexity do not shape accessioning decisions, they do influence what can be shown at any given time.

The exhibition brings together long-held works—some in the collection for more than forty years—alongside recent gifts from devoted collectors and supporters, including Fleur Bresler, Ann Fisher, Neil and Susan Kaye, Jerome and Gwen Paulson, Joe Seltzer, and the Museum’s co-founder and Executive Director Emeritus, Albert LeCoff, whose vision and stewardship established a collection that has played a vital role in documenting and advancing the evolving field.

Together, these works emerge from the vault to offer a rare encounter with the artistry, depth, history, and continuing diversity of creative engagement with wood.

ARTISTS

Teresa Audet, Derek Bencomo, David M. Bender, Garry Knox Bennett, Dixie Biggs, Jérôme Blanc, Christian Burchard, Arthur Espenet Carpenter, Emma Chorostecki, Andy DiPietro, David Ellsworth, Joshua Enck, Jean-François Escoulen and Monique Escoulen, Stephen Gleasner, Laurent Guillot, Nick Flaherty, Alex Henderson, Daniel Forrest Hoffman, Michael Hosaluk, Todd Hoyer, Ted Hunter, William Hunter, Ray Jones, Jack Larimore, Po Shun Leong, Mark Lindquist, Adam John Manley, Rude Osolnik, Gord Peteran, Ellie Richards, Neil Scobie, Brad Sells, Jo Stone, Tommy Simpson, Alan Stirt, Bob Stocksdale, Kimberly Winkle, Jacob Zimmerman

From the Vault is generously supported by the Cambium Giving Society of the Museum for Art in Wood, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Bresler Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, William Penn Foundation, and Windgate Foundation.