Join us for the 2027 Elizabeth and Irwin Warren Folk Art Symposium titled Potential Threads: Un-Raveling and Un-Settling the American Sampler. This one-day, in-person convening is organized in connection with the exhibition Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art, on view at the Museum from October 9, 2026, to February 28, 2027.
A springboard to reconsider early American samplers and other forms of “schoolgirl” art, the convening showcases recent scholarship and new perspectives from art historians, dealers, collectors, and artists working at the intersection of early American art, history, education, textiles, African American studies, and Indigenous studies. Through panels, conversations, and Q&As, this interdisciplinary gathering offers new approaches to understudied girls’ and young women’s practices, as well as reflections on how to reposition needlework by students of European, African, and Native heritage within a larger social, political, and artistic context.
The convening will address topics including the sampler as a tradition, medium, and genre; conditions of production, collection, and dissemination of early American embroideries; early American women’s education and labor; samplers, gender, and settler colonialism; the American landscape tradition in historical needleworks; stitching Black and Indigenous resistance; and the legacies of the sampler tradition for contemporary makers.
Speakers include: Dr. Lynne Anderson, Dr. Racine Barnes, Sarah Brokenborough, Dr. Brenda J. Child, Dr Caroline Culp, Dr Patricia Dawson, Amy Finkel, Dr. Emelie Gevalt, Dr. Mariah Kupfner, Dr. Erica Lome, Dr. Marla Miller, Matthew Monk.
A detailed schedule including venue details, speaker abstracts and biographies will be released soon.
Images
Left: Ga-hah-no Caroline Parker Mt. Pleasant (Tonawanda Seneca Nation, Wolf Clan), New York, c. 1849. Hand-colored daguerreotype, 4 x 3 in. Rochester Museum and Science Center, 2021.1.
Right: Juliana Carpenter (c. 1810–?), Map of Two Hemispheres, Homer, New York, 1825, Watercolor on paper with ink on paper and watercolor on ivory, 18 1/4 x 27 in. Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois, Gift of Conrad M. and Lisa G. Chanzit.
Credit
Lead support for Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art is provided by the Americana Foundation and Elizabeth and Irwin Warren.
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Elizabeth and Irwin Warren; the Henry Luce Foundation; and the Historical Society of Early American Decoration (HSEAD). Major support is provided by Nina Beaty and the Coby Foundation. Generous support is provided by the Every Page Foundation; Deborah Buck Foundation; David and Dixie De Luca; Alexandra and Frederick Peters; Mary lngebrand-Pohlad Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation; the American Folk Art Society; and Jane and Gerald Katcher. Additional support is provided by Citi; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions. Support for the exhibition publication has generously been provided by Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Media support is provided by The Magazine ANTIQUES.
Registration
This program will take place at The Martin E. Segal Theatre, located on the lobby level of the CUNY Graduate Center at 365 5th Avenue (between 34th and 35th streets) in Midtown Manhattan.
Public registration will open soon.
Accessibility
This in-person program is free for all to attend.
The symposium will be livestreamed and recorded; video documentation will be shared at a later date on the Museum’s website, Vimeo and YouTube pages.
For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.