Dates

June 7th 2026

Exhibiting Artists

Caitlin McCormack & Jessica Eldredge

 

Exhibiting location

Glen Foerd Historic House

Glen Foerd is an 18-acre estate featuring a 30,000 square foot mansion, carriage house, gate house, water tower, cottage, garden house, boathouse, pond, tennis lawn, and gardens. Originally built in 1850, the house was renovated in 1893 in the Edwardian Classical Revival style. The material collection includes furniture, dishware, textiles, lighting, and glassware made by prominent Philadelphia artists and craftsmen.

In 1985, the estate was rescued from demolition. Now a public park and non-profit, Glen Foerd receives thousands of visitors who enjoy environmental programs, musical performances, our annual Artist in Residence program, myriad youth programs, and the scenic views of the Delaware River.

Visit thier website to learn more.

Special Event 
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Opening Reception
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When 

Sunday, June 7, 2026
3:00 PM  5:00 PM

Where


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Glen Foerd
5001 Grant AvenuePhiladelphia, PA, 19114United States (map)

 

Reception Information

Celebrate the opening of two new Radical Americana installations at Glen Foerd with an evening of art, conversation, and connection. Be among the first to experience Jessica Eldredge’s Social Fabric Souvenirs and Caitlin McCormack’s Scorpion Grass, on view at Glen Foerd through 2026. 

In partnership with Andalusia Historic House & Gardens, Eldredge and McCormack will be joined by artists Sophie Glenn and Jody Graff for a special panel discussion exploring chairs, quilts, labor, and memory.

Sophie Glenn’s sculpture Philly Jawn, and Jody Graff’s installation A History of Andalusia, Philadelphia and America as Told Through Plants & Narrative Quilts are currently on display at Andalusia through November, 2026.

Explore the mansion and enjoy snacks, drinks, and the waterfront park. This event is free to attend

Register here

Scorpion Grass

In the late spring of this year, fiber sculptor Caitlin McCormack will present a site-specific installation at Glen Foerd on the Delaware, combining crochet, pattern design, and botanical research conducted across the estate’s historic grounds. Hand-wrought textile sculptures of individual plant forms will be photographed, digitally composed into repeating motifs, and translated into custom upholstery fabric. This material will envelop a set of three chairs, each meticulously adorned with delicate hand-crocheted leaves, vines, and flowers tracing appliquéd silhouettes of absent human figures, quietly signaling the presence of those who should occupy these seats, yet remain unseen. A selection of ornately crocheted objects inspired by quotidian domestic items will accompany the furniture, echoing the mansion’s lush interiors and inviting viewers to move around the work, encountering it from multiple vantage points.

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Entitled Scorpion Grass, an unexpectedly ominous name for the Forget-Me-Not, the installation unfolds as a series of grief totems examining obscured histories of labor, endurance, and erasure. The work considers the back-breaking exertion performed by outdoor laborers whose efforts have long been taken for granted in The United States, alongside the violence of their systemic mistreatment, forced servitude and, most recently, inhumane incarceration. The installation resists the historic reduction of these individuals to what they have produced for the wealthy, seeking instead to regard them as complex, fully realized people in need of rest, with identities beyond their labor. Through its interplay of absence and repetition, ornamental fragility and resilience displayed by plants and humans alike, Scorpion Grass invites us to acknowledge both the weight of history and the dignity of lives too often overlooked.

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Artist Information

Caitlin McCormack

Caitlin McCormack (b. 1988) is a Philadelphia-based artist who utilizes textiles to explore queerness, isolation, loss, and existential dread through an uncanny, occasionally humorous lens. Their sculptures contemplate societal reluctance to view gendered craft as art and regard crochet as a behavioral response to apocalyptic conditions. Drawing inspiration from folklore, medieval botanical imagery, institutional osteological displays, science fiction and cinematic body horror, each object is an artifact of a memory, tethered to a surface and made viewable from a distance.

Artist website

featured work

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Green Chair

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Red Chair

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Black Chair

Social Fabric Souvenirs

Social Fabric Souvenirs is inspired by research conducted at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania into past American anniversary celebrations and the objects created to commemorate them. Examining artifacts such as an 1876 handkerchief, a 1926 pinback button, and a 1777 map of Philadelphia, alongside scrapbooks and other keepsakes. revealed how souvenirs preserve personal memory while quietly reflecting the values, hopes, and tensions of their time. This project presents map-inspired printed handkerchiefs and small buttons drawn from the visual language of cartography. Echoing familiar forms of commemoration, these objects question the idea of America’s “social fabric,” considering how the mapped landscape, structured through grids and boundaries, has held generations of people, stories, and contradictions within its lines.

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Artist Information

Jessica Eldredge

How do we see another’s perspective — is it possible? No one sees the same color, a sense or sensation that is beyond words sometimes. The red I see is not the red you see. I think about that when I make art, no one else will see it exactly as I see it, but will they feel it — the joy, the love, the presence in each line, each drop of color? Will they know the way that each part is an exact moment, never to be again, a combination of pigment and water, the brush touches down, with more or less pressure a line from eye to hand to fingers holding and guiding, light, all there in that one small mark, that then joins all the others, finds its place in the grid, captured in the net. Each color a small story, singular and collective, lighter or darker, talking to its neighbors, voice clear. Every part is a reflection of the choice to be present: color, water, brush, surface, body, heart reaching forward to now, back, all the way back, tens of thousands of years to the impulse still visible in dark caves discovered.

Artist website

featured work

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Research Location

Historical Society of Pennsylvainia

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, founded in 1824, is one of the nation’s largest archives of historical documents. We are proud to serve as Philadelphia’s Library of American History, with over 21 million manuscripts, books, and graphic images encompassing centuries of US history. HSP serves more than 4,000 on-site researchers annually, as well as millions more worldwide who use its online resources. HSP is also a leading center for documenting and studying ethnic communities and immigrant experiences in the 20th century, and one of the largest family history libraries in the country. Through educator workshops, research opportunities, public programs, and lectures throughout the year, we strive to make history relevant and exhilarating to all.

View their site
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Full Project

Radical Americana

For the Semiquincentennial, The Clay Studio is leading Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by a consortium of Philadelphia’s arts and cultural institutions. Each celebrates how artists today are continuing the city’s robust legacy as a center for art, skill, and civic engagement. The 45 artists researched and were inspired by the art and history of Philadelphia in 1776, and the subsequent commemorations in 1876, 1926, and 1976. The artists' new work will add their voices to current dialogue about our nation’s present and future, inspire civil dialogue, celebrate Philadelphia's diversity, and continue the rich tradition of creativity in our city.

Learn more