PHILADELPHIA, PA.- This year The Fabric Workshop and Museum unpacks its own history, along with a good number of little-known narratives within contemporary art. The occasion is its 40th anniversary and capping the year has been the literal unpacking of a rarely-exhibited holding within the Museum’s collection—Artist Boxes bursting with notes, sketches, prototypes and ephemera packed by an array of artists ranging from Laurie Anderson, Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle to Mark Bradford, Hella Jongerius and Robert Pruitt.

Process and Practice: 40 Years of Experimentation pairs evocative items from almost 60 boxes containing process materials from its artists residencies with the finished works that were produced in FWM’s Workshop. The selection is drawn from 371 boxes stacked floor to ceiling in the Museum’s archive and from the permanent collection of some 5,000 objects amassed since its inception in 1977.

“Early on in my tenure, members of the staff urged me to look through the boxes to gain insight into the Museum’s impact on the field and better understand its history,” says exhibition curator and FWM Executive Director, Susan Lubowsky Talbott. “Tissue paper was drawn back, fabric unfolded, layers of source material sifted through and notes read. It was a thrilling experience and a way of connecting to the artists—to their thoughts, creative leaps and even false starts. The experience led to this exhibition.”

A number of the objects on view document what are today considered milestones in contemporary art practice. Among these, process material from Chris Burden’s L.A.P.D Uniforms and Gary Simmons’ Step in the Arena (The Essentialist Trap), both exhibited in 1994, are especially timely for their engagement with the issues of violence and race in America. Visitors will also encounter items from boxes that track exciting conceptual leaps, as when Jim Hodges created the first of his large, sculptural floral veils (Every Touch, 1995) or when Roy Lichtenstein moved from painted canvas to screen printing on textile in a work that takes the form of a silk sateen shirt (Untitled, 1979) painted with the Benday dots and bands of color that became his trademark. Process and Practice also features a good many works of art exhibited for the first time in decades, as well as the never-before-exhibited, such as Untitled (pulpit no. 2.5) by Nate Young (2016).

Accompanying the exhibition is Process and Practice: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, the third in a series of publications documenting the works of art created by Artists-in-Residence and the permanent collection at FWM. Process and Practice features essays by the contemporary art scholars Nancy Princenthal and Patterson Sims as well as by the exhibition curator, Susan Lubowsky Talbott.