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, 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 this program is provided by the Americana Foundation and Elizabeth and Irwin Warren.
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.
It will be livestream and recorded (the video documentation will be shared at a later date on our website, Vimeo and YouTube pages).
For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.