Wharton Esherick Museum presents Jennifer Johnson: All the Time in the World

During her 2026 residency at Wharton Esherick Museum, Johnson studied the buildings, furniture, and tools in different seasons, light, and weather. Perspectives in her 89 ceramic mosaics swoop from aerial views to close-ups of a chair made of hammer handles, for instance, or the sinuous interplay of floorboards. Porcelain models show how the buildings looked together over time.

At home with Esherick

Johnson’s primary medium is clay, and she is known for engaging with artists’ legacies and site-specific projects, including Glen Foerd, Crane Arts, and more. When the Wharton Esherick Museum selected her as its 2026 Artist in Residence, she responded with creations that pay homage to Esherick’s work and life so seamlessly that they look as if they’ve always been there. It’s interesting to note that Johnson’s MFA in ceramics from Tyler School of Art was preceded by her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College: the philosophical studies perhaps contributed to the way All the Time in the World feels profoundly meditative in its surroundings.

From 1926 until the end of his life, Esherick (born and raised in Philadelphia) added buildings, furniture, tools, and artworks to the 12-acre woodland property. From the architecture to the wooden spoons, everything is curvaceous, handmade, and designed to suit the material as well as the humans who open the drawers, reach for the cutting boards, answer the landline phone. Touring the place is an adventure that leads to longing: why can’t our everyday things be so beautiful and cleverly made?

Time to create timelessness

While most of Johnson’s mosaics are displayed in the Visitor Center gallery (once Esherick’s one-car garage), the porcelain models and six of the mosaics are placed around the Studio, where they look very much at home. The small mosaics are particularly beguiling, with organic shapes in subtle colors contained in angular frames. Within each piece, the mortar between segments creates a stained-glass sensibility, and the delineated shapes emphasize the thought behind the designing and building of such things as a door handle or a paper towel holder. Frames mortared around each mosaic, in unglazed dark stoneware segments, add an organic, Arts and Crafts symmetry to individual pieces that extends to the exhibition as a whole.

Johnson honors Esherick’s lifetime of artistic labor with her own meticulous processes. The images are drawn from observing the buildings and grounds, but also from research into Esherick’s life. For example, perched on a shelf in the bedroom is a mosaic portraying his childhood home.

The pale porcelain models were first fired at Johnson’s studio, and then wood-fired for 36 hours at the clay studio in Yellow Springs, where the wood ash gave serendipitous surface colors and glossy textures to the pieces. The mosaics were constructed from dark stoneware mortared onto tile board, with hand-mixed underglaze colors applied between first and second firings. (Underglaze is essentially clay with pigment; it can be brushed on and doesn’t add gloss. Glaze is vitreous, with minerals that impart color when melted, making a layer of glass on the piece.) The resulting colors are rich yet muted, a quality achieved through another laborious process: first dulled by acid wash to remove excess mortar, then intensified with oil-based tile sealer. The result is an ageless-looking gleam.

Rewarding a long gaze

The gallery in the Visitor Center just manages to accommodate 83 of the mosaics in a tight but well-arranged display. In contrast to the free-form installation of about half of the pieces, one wall is devoted to 40 works arranged in four orderly rows. They are all the same size (6.75 by 4.75 inches), and Johnson considers the group a single artwork called All the Time in the World, Arrangement of 40 Mosaics. Together they take viewers on a visual tour of the physical surroundings, beginning with Curved Boardwalk Arrival, then examining things like roof peaks, windows, weathervanes, fireplaces, and aerial views, and ending with Curved Path and Building Shadows.

Every mosaic in the exhibition rewards a long gaze; of particular note is Five Views of the Hammer Handle Chair, hung opposite the Visitor Center entrance. Its pleasing colors and graceful design catch our attention and hold it. The mortar lines that loop to connect each chair give the impression that they’re dancing together. It’s extraordinary.

Jennifer Johnson will give an artist’s talk on Saturday, November 14 from 2-3:30pm.

At top: Jennifer Johnson’s 2026 piece Five Views of the Hammer Handle Chair (1938); dark stoneware cone 5, underglaze, mortar, tile board. (Photo by Constance Mensh; image courtesy of the artist.)

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