NEW YORK, NY.- This fall, the American Folk Art Museum presents Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art, a major exhibition bringing together works from across the field. Presented during the nation’s semiquincentennial, Locating Girlhood reexamines the often-overlooked artistic production of girls and young women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, highlighting their sustained engagement with representations of place long before the emergence of more widely recognized traditions of American landscape art. Drawing on loans from institutions and private collections across the United States and Canada, the exhibition offers one of the most significant explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled.

“The American Folk Art Museum has long championed the creative achievements of American girls and young women,” said Jason T. Busch, the Museum’s Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO. “Since our founding, the Museum has played a leading role in advancing the study and appreciation of these artworks through landmark exhibitions, scholarship, and publications led by pioneering figures in the field. As the nation commemorates its 250th anniversary, Locating Girlhood offers a timely opportunity to look anew at these extraordinary objects and the layered histories they embody.”

“This exhibition and the accompanying publication seek to shed new light on the rich yet underexplored genre of early American ‘schoolgirl’ art. Building on foundational scholarship that identified makers, teachers, and schools, Locating Girlhood turns attention to broader questions of place, identity, and experience. We ask not only who created these works, but why girls made them and what they reveal about their lives and worlds,” added Emelie Gevalt, PhD, AFAM’s Deborah Davenport & Stewart Stender Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, representations of place formed a persistent visual thread in samplers, needlework pictures, watercolors, and other ornamental works produced as part of girls’ education. Historically grouped under the umbrella term “schoolgirl art,” these objects depict a wide range of place-based subjects, including pastoral landscapes, gardens, cityscapes, maps, and other geographic motifs that evolved over time to reflect shifting social values, aspirations, and anxieties.





While landscape painting has been widely studied in American art history—as a symbol of national identity, religious belief, and environmental belonging—works by girls and young women have often been excluded from these interpretive frameworks. They have frequently been dismissed as decorative or craft-based rather than conceptually engaged.

Expanding on scholarship that has primarily emphasized attribution, pedagogy, and stylistic classification, Locating Girlhood instead centers a core art historical question: why was place such a dominant subject in the visual production of young women? The exhibition explores this inquiry through works made in the British American colonies and the early United States, while broadening the traditionally limited canon by bringing into view works by Black and Native American students alongside those of white students, offering a more inclusive historical frame. By tracing shared thematic concerns across these objects, the show invites viewers to understand them not only as artifacts of education or decorative practice, but as meaningful expressions of how girls and young women experienced and imagined the world around them.

Locating Girlhood features nearly a hundred works drawn from AFAM’s collection in addition to more than two dozen institutions and private collections, among them: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, the DAR Museum, Northwestern University Libraries, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History.

Loan highlights include a monumental Boston needlework picture from among the celebrated group known as the “Fishing Lady” scenes (1747–50), one of the most ambitious examples of eighteenth-century American embroidery; a rare seventeenth-century needlework picture attributed to Sarah Phillips (c. 1670), among the earliest surviving works of its kind; Mary Lemmon’s celebrated quillwork coat-of-arms, known as the Lemmon-Phillips Filigree (1735); and Mary King’s extraordinary Tree of Life needlework picture (1754), a masterpiece of colonial American needlework.

The exhibition will also include exceptional paintings, samplers, and works on paper, including Gilbert Stuart’s double portrait of Anna Dorothea Foster and Charlotte Anna Dick (1790–91), Hannah Pearson Cogswell’s rare depiction of female education at Atkinson Academy (1811–12), and Jacob Marling’s The May Queen (1816).
Because of their fragility and sensitivity to light, many of these works are rarely exhibited, making this a unique opportunity to experience them firsthand.
Admission to the American Folk Art Museum is always free.

Locating Girlhood is curated by Emelie Gevalt, PhD, AFAM’s Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, and Caroline Culp, PhD, AFAM’s former Warren Family Assistant Curator and now Brock Curator of American Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA.

ACCOMPANYING PUBLICATION

Published in conjunction with the exhibition is a lavishly illustrated volume presenting new scholarship on key works drawn from major collections of girlhood embroidery and ornamental arts. In addition to essays by curators Gevalt and Culp, the publication includes a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, contributions by art historian Elizabeth Bacon Eager and literary scholar William Huntting Howell, and an afterword by art historian Andrea Pappas.

Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art is co-published by the American Folk Art Museum and Skira. The 256-page volume is currently available for pre-order through the Museum Shop and will be available for purchase throughout the exhibition. $60; American Folk Art Museum members receive a 10% discount.