Working at a Joyous Creative Thing: Weaving, Making, and Material Culture in Letty Esherick’s Legacy
From the Wharton Esherick Museum website:
“Just now I want a chance to do what you have been doing all your life, working at a joyous creative thing, which I hope will pave the way for my being self-supporting. This may be too late for me – but I still want to try.”
– Letty Esherick in a letter to Wharton Esherick, 1947
Unlike most Wharton Esherick Museum Artists-in-Residence, Kelly Cobb has focused her research not on Wharton himself but on Leticia (Letty) Nofer Esherick, the dynamic artist, dancer, educator, and creative powerhouse whom Wharton married in 1912. While Wharton’s career was shaped in large part by Letty’s support – financial, intellectual, emotional, and otherwise – her own creative legacy has too often been overlooked. The letter excerpted above, written after her separation from Wharton and the raising of their children, reflects Letty’s intense desire for artistic recognition, creative opportunity, and economic independence.
Working at a Joyous Creative Thing showcases original textiles by Letty Esherick discovered by WEM staff in 2022. They include garments, weaving samples, and works-in-progress, and likely date from the 1940s through her death in 1975. Cobb is among the first scholars to study these textiles. She combines material-based research with WEM’s extensive paper and photographic archives related to Letty, as well as fieldwork at sites like Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, where Letty studied weaving in the late 1940s. Cobb’s research is supported in part by a College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Go Grant from the University of Delaware.
In the spirit of community, and echoing Letty’s interests across a wide range of art forms, Cobb worked with a group of interdisciplinary artists whose creative practices resonate with Letty’s own. This installation includes works by Nicole Feller-Johnson, Sophia Gupman, Eliza Hardy Jones, Abby Lutz, Dana Meyer, and Joy O. Ude.