Dear Friends,
I hope you’ve enjoyed your summer. Before the autumn officially arrives, I want to share a glimpse of the stimulating season ahead—and take a moment to look back at what the last few months held for the American Folk Art Museum.
Locating Girlhood, Folk Nation, and a New American Folk Art Museum
On Friday, October 9, we will welcome the public to Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art and the return of Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States. Both exhibitions continue our celebration of the United States’s Semiquincentennial, with Locating Girlhood being a particularly exciting moment for the Museum.
Bringing together nearly 100 works from more than two dozen institutions and private collections across the United States and Canada, Locating Girlhood offers one of the most significant explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled. The exhibition shines a light on the often-overlooked creative production of girls and young women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their sustained engagement with representations of place, identity, and community. You can learn more in this excellent preview by The New York Times.
An early congratulations to Emelie Gevalt, our Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, and Caroline Culp, AFAM’s former Warren Family Assistant Curator and now Brock Curator of American Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA. I have no doubt this is going to be an extraordinary show.
These exhibitions will debut at an important moment for the Museum itself, as we will unveil our new, fully accessible entrance, welcoming visitors into a renewed American Folk Art Museum. This marks the completion of our two-year renovation project, the most significant transformation of our home in more than 30 years in Lincoln Square.
We look forward to welcoming you through our new doors.
A Lasting Impression: Self-Made
Our exhibition Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists recently closed following a critically acclaimed run. This exhibition of self-taught artists grew out of Rethinking Biography, a reparative cataloguing project launched by the Museum in 2023 to strengthen the stewardship of our twentieth- and twenty-first-century collection. That work prompted us to reconsider how these works are defined and contextualized; Self-Made brought that thinking to life in our galleries.
The exhibition demonstrated the strength of our modern and contemporary holdings while foregrounding the voices and perspectives of the artists themselves. Bravo to co-curators Valérie Rousseau, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, and Suzie Oppenheimer, who served as Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Research Associate.
I’m also delighted to share that Self-Made will travel to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, next spring, allowing these AFAM-held works to reach new audiences.
More Summer Highlights
Speaking of the Currier Museum, last month I had the pleasure of gathering with AFAM patrons there to celebrate the opening of the New Hampshire Antiques Show. This year, we were delighted to partner with the Currier and The Magazine ANTIQUES to welcome more than 100 friends for an evening featuring a catered reception and curator-led exhibition tours.
To learn more about joining us next year, please contact my colleague Nick Cohn, Chief Advancement Officer, at ncohn@folkartmuseum.org.
Summer also saw the continuation of our annual Youth Art Connections program. Over six weeks, New York City high school students explored the world of art and museums through AFAM’s free summer program, gaining behind-the-scenes access to the Museum, creating their own artwork, and visiting arts institutions across the city. This year’s program included visits to the Met’s American Wing; MoMA’s summer exhibition, American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; Chelsea galleries; and, of course, AFAM’s exhibitions and collection.
AFAM Quilts on the Road
Our exhibition Wall Power! Spectacular Quilts from the American Folk Art Museum opens at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio on October 17. Drawing from AFAM’s renowned quilt collection, Wall Power! features striking works ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, from Alabama to Pennsylvania. The exhibition highlights four areas of the collection: early twentieth-century quilts from the craft revival, Amish designs, works by African American makers, and traditional nineteenth-century patterns that influenced generations of quiltmakers.
As a reminder, last fall’s exhibition, An Ecology of Quilts, will hit the road this coming spring, starting with its presentation at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.
Funding News
I’m also delighted to share that the Museum has recently received generous grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Adamson Foundation. This support is an important investment in AFAM’s future and will help us continue our work of caring for, interpreting, and sharing our collection with audiences near and far.
Thank you, as always, for being part of the American Folk Art Museum community. I look forward to welcoming you to the Museum this fall—and, especially, to welcoming you through our new entrance.
With gratitude,
Jason
Jason T. Busch
Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO