Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art

American Folk Art Museum to Present Landmark Exhibition of 
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Needlework and Ornamental Arts

October 9, 2026–February 28, 2027

NEW YORK, June 16, 2026 — In fall 2026, the American Folk Art Museum will present 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, the exhibition 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, Locating Girlhood offers one of the most significant explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled.

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, imagined, and shaped their relationship to the world around them.

Featuring nearly a hundred works, Locating Girlhood will include prominent loans from more than two dozen institutions and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, the DAR Museum, Northwestern University Libraries, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. Among the highlights are 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. 

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.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT

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 Americana Foundation; Every Page Foundation; David and Dixie De Luca; 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.