A Usable Past: Reflections on a Nation and Its Inheritance 

November 7, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Curator: Jennifer-Navva Milliken

A Usable Past: Reflections on a Nation and Its Inheritance brings together sculpture by eleven artists who reckon with America’s layered histories. From family lineages and ancestral myths to rooted or shifting values, the ideas that drive these works probe how the nation’s past continues to shape these artists and their experience of the present. Drawing from the metaphorical power inherent in the material of wood, these artists translate inheritance into form, giving “shape and substance to national identity.” 

Artists:

Vivian Chiu, Damien Davis, Michael De Forest, Raul De Lara, Aspen Golann, Terry Holzgreen, James Maurelle, Jordan Nassar, Ato Ribeiro, Gina Siepel, David J. Wilson

A Usable Past 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, and Windgate Foundation.

Pictured above: James Maurelle, Mathilde, 2022. Photo by John Carlano