NEW YORK, January 14, 2025 – The American Folk Art Museum announced today that Dr. Emelie Gevalt, the Museum’s Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art, has been promoted to Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, effective immediately. In her expanded role, Gevalt will oversee all aspects of the Museum’s exhibition programs, art collections, and learning and engagement activities, including continuing to curate exhibitions, author scholarship, and maintain and expand the Museum‘s holdings through strategic acquisitions and major gifts.
Jason T. Busch, Becky and Bob Alexander Director and CEO of the American Folk Art Museum, commented on the promotion: “In the six years since I joined the Museum, our exhibitions have achieved new heights in ambition, scale, and academic rigor, which is due in no small part to Emelie’s curatorial vision and collaborative spirit. Emelie has quickly earned recognition within the field as one of the leading American art curators of her generation, whose fresh perspective on folk art and American history continues to advance new interpretations and perceptions in the 21st century. She has also been a tremendous partner in expanding the Museum’s network to new and prospective patrons, including playing a pivotal role in significant financial gifts and acquisitions that have greatly enhanced our collection.”
Since joining the American Folk Art Museum in 2019, Gevalt has been instrumental in organizing critically acclaimed and highly popular exhibitions at the Museum. She has elevated the Museum’s profile through academically-focused projects that have expanded and shifted prevailing attitudes about folk art, as well as garnering significant international media attention.
The notable exhibitions led by Gevalt at AFAM include What that Quilt Knows About Me (2023), which presented quilts as collections of intimate stories, exploring the deeply personal and emotional power associated with the experience of making and living with quilts. Spanning from the 19th through 21st centuries, the quilts on view in the exhibition revealed a range of poignant and sometimes unexpected biographies of the maker and recipients of the quilts, from a pair of enslaved sisters in antebellum Kentucky to a convalescent British soldier during the Crimean War. The exhibition was named to The New York Times’ “Best Art of 2023” list.
Emelie Gevalt remarked: “I am delighted to expand the scope of my responsibilities as a curator at the Museum. Under Jason’s leadership, AFAM has embraced and fostered a culture that seeks a more expansive understanding of folk and self-taught art, allowing the Museum to tell new stories through our exhibitions and engage with the public to rethink their understanding of art history. I am excited to collaborate more closely with all of my colleagues at AFAM, including our exceptional Curatorial, Collections, and Learning and Engagement teams, to further advance this mission going forward.”
In addition to What that Quilt Knows About Me, Gevalt recently organized the much-heralded Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2023), which The New York Times praised as “vitally important” and “deeply moving.” Through 125 works of various media, Unnamed Figures invited visitors to focus on Black figures who appear in—or are omitted from—early American images, challenging conventional narratives that have minimized early African American histories in the North. With this project, which drew on her doctoral research, Gevalt brought together a talented team of co-curators, scholars, and other colleagues to produce the exhibition and accompanying publication, offering a new window onto Black representation in a region that is often overlooked in narratives of early African American history.
As evident in both exhibitions, Gevalt’s research and curatorial interests encompass 18th- and 19th-century American art and material culture, with a focus on portraiture, textiles, decorative painting, the Colonial Revival movement, and African American representation. In addition to providing new historical insights, her work also looks at this material through the lens of 20th- and 21st-century histories of collecting and collective memory, with an eye toward resituating folk art within a broader modern and contemporary context. Her research has been supported by grants from, among others, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Craft Research Fund, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gevalt is also responsible for the Museum’s accessioning of major new works that have greatly expanded the scope of the collection. Among them are Ammi Phillips’ celebrated Portrait of Frederick A. Gale, which joins the Museum’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work, including the famed Girl in a Red Dress with Cat and Dog; the first works to enter the Museum’s collection by the itinerant artist John Brewster Jr. (1766 – 1854); significant acquisitions to the Museum’s quilt collection, including several examples by 20th-century African American makers (for instance, a denim “Housetop” quilt by Gee’s Bend quilter Lucy Mingo) and by other living artists, such as Tomie Nagano; and a rare sampler featuring a Black figure, which was featured in Unnamed Figures.
These acquisitions, among others, were completed as part of a comprehensive and strategic review of the collection recently conducted by Gevalt and Dr. Valérie Rousseau, AFAM’s Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, to guide the Museum’s future acquisitions.
Gevalt received her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. Her two decades of art-world experience include positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Christie’s, New York, where she served as a Vice President in the Estates, Appraisals & Valuations department.
About the American Folk Art Museum
Founded in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum is a global leader dedicated to the preservation and promotion of folk and self-taught art across time and place. Candid, genuine, and unexpected, the Museum celebrates the creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined largely through personal experience rather than formal artistic training. With a collection spanning 8,000 works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent, the American Folk Art Museum engages people of all backgrounds through its collections, exhibitions, publications, and public programs as the leading forum shaping the understanding and appreciation of folk and self-taught art. Thanks to the generous support of our members, patrons, and donors, admission to the Museum is always free.