The Fabric Workshop and Museum

This guide to The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia opens with three hundred seventy-one boxes of failed experiments stored behind the scenes, in a museum built around a business plan that itself failed. It follows Marion Boulton Stroud, known as Kippy, who opened the space in 1977 hoping to print and sell artist-designed fabric, only to watch the visiting artists abandon yardage for sculpture and costume instead. You'll meet sculptor Louise Nevelson, who arrived in 1984 at eighty-five to attempt opera costumes she had never designed before. The staff still box up whatever gets made this afternoon, wreckage included.