The Fabric Workshop and Museum

The Fabric Workshop and Museum Collaborating with artists, revealing new possibilities. https://linkin.bio/ig-fabricworkshop
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The Fabric Workshop and Museum was founded in 1977 with a visionary purpose: to stimulate experimentation among leading contemporary artists and to share the process of creating works of art with the public. Providing studio facilities, equipment, and expert technicians, FWM originally invited artists to experiment with fabric, and later with a wide range of innovative materials and media. From th

e outset, FWM also served as an education center for Philadelphia’s youth who, as printing apprentices, learned technical and vocational skills along with approaches to creative expression. Today, FWM is recognized as an internationally acclaimed contemporary art museum, uniquely distinguished as the only institution in the United States devoted to creating work in new materials and new media in collaboration with artists coming from diverse artistic backgrounds—including sculpture, installation, video, painting, ceramics, and architecture. Research, construction, and fabrication occur on-site in studios that are open to the public, providing visitors with the opportunity to see artwork from conception to completion. In fact, the FWM’s permanent collection includes not only complete works of art, but also material research, samples, prototypes, and photography and video of artists making and speaking about their work. FWM seeks to bring this spirit of artistic investigation and discovery to the wider public and to area school children in particular, to ensure and broaden their access to art, and to advance the role of art as a catalyst for innovation and social connection. FWM offers an unparalleled experience to the most significant artists of our time, students, and the general public. The FWM has developed from an ambitious experiment to a renowned institution with a widely-recognized Artist-in-Residence Program, an extensive permanent collection of new work created by artists at the Museum, in-house and touring exhibitions, and comprehensive educational programming including lectures, tours, in-school presentations and student apprenticeships.

Do you know any originary tales of the Americas that stretch beyond the “birth” of the United States as a nation? This w...
05/31/2026

Do you know any originary tales of the Americas that stretch beyond the “birth” of the United States as a nation?

This work by Luis Jiménez unites two iconic symbols of Mexican American culture. He adorns the backseat of a custom low rider car with the personified figures of two volcanoes in the Valley of Mexico. In Aztec myth, the tragedy of Popocatépetl, here a brooding warrior, and his love Iztaccíhuatl, supine and twisted in the throes of death, serves as the explanation for the mountainous terrain near present-day Mexico City.

On view in Some American Dreams. Included with free admission through June 14>> https://bit.ly/SomeAmericanDreams

Image: Luis Jiménez, in collaboration with FWM. "Low Rider Backseat,” 1983. Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

Philly, we are open all weekend with free admission! ⁠🎟 ⁠Check out:Jesse Krimes: Elegy QuiltsSome American Dreams (final...
05/30/2026

Philly, we are open all weekend with free admission! ⁠🎟
⁠
Check out:
Jesse Krimes: Elegy Quilts
Some American Dreams (final weeks)
⁠
Plan your visit>> https://bit.ly/FreeTicketsFWM
⁠
📷️: Jesse Krimes, "Aurora," 2021, on view in "Elegy Quilts" at FWM. Photo credit: Gustavo Garcia, Colíbri Workshop. Courtesy of Mural Arts Philadelphia.

05/27/2026

Are you familiar with friendship stars?

This quilt design has been used for centuries to symbolize the bonds of friendship, love, and community. In this workshop, reflect on your friendships while screenprinting and embroidering your own star design!

THU JUN 11
4–6 PM

Sign up: https://bit.ly/4dBzc57

On this day in 1962, an abandoned strip mine used as a landfill caught fire in the borough of Centralia, PA. The trash b...
05/27/2026

On this day in 1962, an abandoned strip mine used as a landfill caught fire in the borough of Centralia, PA. The trash burning was planned. The town's leaders had not foreseen, however, that the fire would spread through an unsealed passageway to a coal-rich network of tunnels running beneath them. The fire burns to this day, spewing lethal carbon monoxide from fissures in the ground.

In 1985, FWM Artist-in-Residence Becky Howland memorialized the Centralia Fire as one of several industry-driven environmental disasters in plateware for her satirical tableset. Howland invites us to dine with toxic waste barrel cups, ashtrays modeled into infected lungs, candlesticks in the form of fiery oil drums from Sunoco, Shell, and Arco, and a large money bag vase. Her Centralia dinnerplate refers to Congress’s legislation to relocate the town’s residents, approved the previous year.

The other half of the plate names Times Beach, MO, then one of the most toxic sites in the country due to the spraying of dioxin. But its fate offers us some optimism: through the actions of Congress and the EPA in the 80s and 90s, the area has since been restored to a state park, creating green space for recreation.

“Toxicological Tablecloth” is on view with free admission>> https://bit.ly/SomeAmericanDreams

Learn more about the artwork>> https://bit.ly/4uzBaJt

Images: Becky Howland, in collaboration with FWM. “Toxicological Tablecloth,” 1984. Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie? During her 1988 FWM residency, S.A. Bachman developed a confrontational pro...
05/23/2026

Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?

During her 1988 FWM residency, S.A. Bachman developed a confrontational project to address representations of women and white privilege. Using halftone techniques, she composed an edition of banners featuring aspirational images of middle-class standardized housing, the nuclear family, innocent girlhood, and the idealized womanhood of dolls.

The artist’s titular question critiques the pervasive exclusion of the American dream on the basis of race. In this reframing, the residue of Jim Crow is neither exclusive to the American South nor relegated to the past, but a tacit and ongoing social contract adopted across the country.

The series of banners was publicly displayed at three locations across Philadelphia and accompanied by public forums examining racial divisions in the city.

Free tickets>> https://bit.ly/SomeAmericanDreams
Learn more about the artist>> https://bit.ly/4nHUKk2

Images: S.A. Bachman, in collaboration with FWM. “Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?,” 1988. Edition of 5. FWM Visual Archive; Installation Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

The City of Philadelphia has named May 21 “Ona Judge Day” in recognition of the seamstress and bondswoman who styled Mar...
05/21/2026

The City of Philadelphia has named May 21 “Ona Judge Day” in recognition of the seamstress and bondswoman who styled Martha Washington and escaped to freedom in 1796.

Next Thursday, join us for a powerful procession with artist indira allegra honoring the lives of both Ona Judgeand Rem’mie Fells, the aspiring fashion designer and trans woman who was tragically killed in 2020.

This community-filled procession follows Judge’s escape to the Delaware River. There, you’ll encounter the North Wind, a schooner outfitted with sails created in collaboration with FWM using 18th century techniques and fabrics reflecting Fells’s vibrant aesthetic.

Co-commissioned by ArtPhilly and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation as part of the What Now: 2026 festival.

THU MAY 28
5–7 PM
RSVP encouraged: bit.ly/49dZjwF

Images: indira allegra. Sail Through This to That, 2026. Created in collaboration with FWM. Photo credit: Brandon C. Ballard.

In this wallpaper, artist Nicole Eisenman employs a cell style evocative of comic books and film stills to present vigne...
05/20/2026

In this wallpaper, artist Nicole Eisenman employs a cell style evocative of comic books and film stills to present vignettes of life in a women’s prison.

Featuring scenes of labor, dining, exercise, sexual encounters, violence, and escape, the wallpaper echoes recurrent tropes of the women-in-prison movie, a subgenre of exploitation films that was largely popular in the mid-twentieth century. The films commonly featured ambivalent negotiations of feminine morality, sexuality, “deviance,” and violence.
Eisenman’s deployment of the criminal woman archetype holds the sobering reality of confinement, abuse, and inequity in the American carceral system in tension with the q***r campiness of these vividly colored, cartoon-like figures.

On view in Some American Dreams. Included with free admission.

Images: Nicole Eisenman, in collaboration with FWM. Gray Bar Hotel, 2003. Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

Beneath colorful light and wandering shadows, Kara Walker’s spinning paper lanterns confront the unsettling ways that vi...
05/20/2026

Beneath colorful light and wandering shadows, Kara Walker’s spinning paper lanterns confront the unsettling ways that violent histories can be transformed into spectacle and entertainment. Inspired by the popularity of antebellum magic lantern shows, Walker’s projections cast silhouettes of flames, a raven, and the explosive blast of a cannon.

What story would you bring to light?

Join us for a hands-on workshop where you’ll create your own cyclorama using screenprinting, colored gels, mylar, and drawing tools.

THU JUN 4
4–6 PM
Register: bit.ly/42nJ5gB

Images: Kara Walker in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, “Magic Lantern (Stars and Cannon),” 2004 and “Magic Lantern (Flames),” 2004. Photo credit: Constance Mensh; Workshop cyclorama sample created by FWM Education. Courtesy of FWM Visual Archives.

Drawing on his ecstatic visions, Rev. Howard Finster envisions the American landscape as a fantastic, even apocalyptic s...
05/19/2026

Drawing on his ecstatic visions, Rev. Howard Finster envisions the American landscape as a fantastic, even apocalyptic space replete with otherworldly winged creatures, angels, rockets, and UFOs soaring over a verdant field.

Finster, who led the life of a preacher, bicycle repairman, and inventor, devoted himself to art at the age of 60 in response to a vision from God. Despite his late start, he created more than 46,000 artworks during his lifetime. This one from his 1984 FWM residency is numbered his 3,520th work of art.

On view in Some American Dreams. Included with free admission.

Images: Rev. Howard Finster, in collaboration with FWM. “Road to Eternity,” 1984. Photo credit: Constance Mensh; Howard Finster works on mylar drawings of his work “Road to Eternity,” c. 1984. FWM Visual Archive.

Address

1214 Arch Street
Philadelphia, PA
19107

Opening Hours

Wednesday 12pm - 6pm
Thursday 12pm - 6pm
Friday 12pm - 6pm
Saturday 12pm - 5pm
Sunday 12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+12155618888

Website

http://store.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/

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