American Folk Art Museum Announces 2026 Exhibitions
Three exhibitions explore artistic self-representation and identity during America’s 250th anniversary year
NEW YORK, December 1, 2025 — The American Folk Art Museum, the nation’s museum of folk and self-taught art, will present three original exhibitions in 2026. Addressing themes of artistic identity, agency, and national belonging, these projects reaffirm AFAM’s commitment to exploring how creativity both reflects and shapes cultural experience.
The upcoming presentations—Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States, and Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art—will be on view in the Museum’s recently renovated galleries. Together, they engage timely questions of belonging, self-definition, and collective memory as the nation marks the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Opening on April 10, 2026, Self-Made and Folk Nation will launch a spring season of dynamic programming. Locating Girlhood will follow in the autumn, opening on October 8, 2026.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists
April 10 – September 13, 2026
Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists provides an innovative focus on artistic self-representations of the twentieth century as well as contemporary works, addressing for the first time how formally untrained artists have identified, imagined, and depicted themselves as “capital-A Artists.” Examining methods of artistic self-fashioning, including self-portraiture, signature pieces, and depictions of alter egos, the exhibition takes a critical approach to the historical formulation of the “self-taught artist” in the United States, from the first half of the twentieth century to present time. A tightly curated selection of 90 artworks, primarily drawn from the American Folk Art Museum collection, the exhibition includes photographs, artists’ notebooks and videos, as well as prime examples of drawings, paintings, and sculptures—many of them recent or rarely seen acquisitions.
Works by John Kane, Morris Hirshfield, Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Thornton Dial Sr., Joe Coleman, and Nicole Appel are placed in dialogue with pieces by seminal international artists such as Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, Adolf Wölfli, and Marcel Bascoulard. This presentation offers a rich survey of key figures and contributions against a backdrop of the most recent scholarship in this artistic area, with persuasive insights into artistic status, creative aspirations, intentions, and agency from this field defining period.
Self-Made is curated by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Suzie Oppenheimer, Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellow.
Major support for this exhibition is provided by Roberta S. and Ralph S. Terkowitz. Additional support is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation, 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.
Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States
Opening April 10, 2026 – September 2027
Mounted during the celebration of the United States semiquincentennial, Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States draws from the American Folk Art Museum’s rich collections to explore links between vernacular art and the construction of an American sense of self. Introducing visitors to the concept of “folk” as a category developed in conjunction with the art and antiques markets, this exhibition positions works as multilayered in their meanings, imbued with cultural significance by not only their creators, but also their collectors and subsequent owners. Americans have long preserved objects as a way of telling stories about themselves. Beginning after the Revolutionary War and gathering momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people turned to early American things to construct a national history and sense of collective identity—an impulse often driven by lingering insecurity about the young nation’s perceived cultural provinciality compared to Europe.
This concentrated exhibition illuminates how makers both historical and contemporary have employed a kaleidoscopic variety of media to express love of country while also revealing the complexities and contradictions embedded in such expressions.
Folk Nation is curated by Emelie Gevalt, PhD, Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, and Caroline Culp, PhD, Warren Family Assistant Curator. It will be presented in the Audrey B. Heckler Gallery.
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Catherine Loevner. 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.
Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art
October 8, 2026 – February 28, 2027
Featuring spectacular examples of needlework and other ornamental arts made by American girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art sheds new light on a rich but understudied genre, offering one of the most significant presentations on the subject in recent memory. This major loan exhibition brings together approximately 100 exceptional objects from over 35 museums and private collections nationwide, uniting celebrated masterpieces with remarkable lesser-known gems rarely seen by the public.
Unlike many earlier exhibitions, Locating Girlhood explores girlhood artworks from an explicitly art historical perspective, reframing these objects through the lens of place. Though the story of landscape art in the United States has traditionally centered on male academic painters, American girls and young women were laboring over a variety of landscape scenes long before the Hudson River School. From the eighteenth century onwards, representations of landscape were a common visual thread in samplers, needlework pictures, watercolors, and other artworks commonly united under the umbrella term “schoolgirl art,” extending from country scenes and cityscapes to maps and other cartographic compositions. By considering these works as deeply resonant expressions of place, the exhibition expands the story of the American landscape and situates women at its heart.
Timed to coincide with the US’s semiquincentennial, the Locating Girlhood both celebrates the creativity of early American girls and women and critically examines the colonial and early federal ideologies that structured their worldview.
Locating Girlhood is curated by Emelie Gevalt, PhD, Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, and Caroline Culp, PhD, Warren Family Assistant Curator.
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Elizabeth and Irwin Warren. Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Historical Society of Early American Decoration (HSEAD). Additional support is provided by 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 catalogue has generously been provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
Images: Bill Traylor (1853–1949), Untitled (Blue Construction, Figures, and Bottles; or Two Men Reaching for Bottles), 1939–1942, poster paint and graphite on cardboard, 10 3/4 x 15 inches, included in Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists; Situation of America, 1848, New York City, 1848, oil on wood panel, 34 x 57 x 1 3/8 inches, included in Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States; Ruthy Rogers, Sampler, Marblehead, Massachusetts, c. 1789, silk on linen, 10 1/2 x 9 inches, included in Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States. All works from the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY.