In this program, Emelie Gevalt and Caroline Culp, co-curators of Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art at the American Folk Art Museum, walk us through the exhibition. The major loan show brings together spectacular examples of needlework and other ornamental arts made by American girls and young women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This curatorial walkthrough highlights the works on view in the galleries, including needlework, watercolors, painted furniture and other decorative objects. Offering an art historical perspective, this program will expand our understanding of girlhood artworks, reframing the objects through the lens of place and the story of the American landscape.
About the speakers
Dr. Emelie Gevalt is Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Office at the American Folk Art Museum (NYC). Gevalt earned her BA in art history and theater studies from Yale University (magna cum laude), her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. Her work encompasses wide-ranging research interests in early American portraiture, landscape, decorative painting, textiles, and African American representation, as well as histories of collecting and collective memory. Gevalt’s past exhibitions include the critically acclaimed What that Quilt Knows About Me and Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North, both staged at AFAM in 2023. She brings two decades of art-world experience, including roles at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and as a Vice President in Christie’s Estates, Appraisals & Valuations department.
Dr. Caroline Culp is the Brock Curator of American Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia and previously served as Warren Family Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum (NYC). Culp earned her BA in Art History and History (with Honors) from Wake Forest University and her MA and PhD in Art History from Stanford University. A specialist in colonial and early national painting, material culture, and women artists, she has held curatorial positions at a wide range of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. As a curator, her exhibitions have included This Drop of Earth: American Landscape Miniatures, 1840-1890, Between the Lines: Innovation and Expression in Women’s Sewing Samplers, and Fertile Ground: The Hudson Valley Animal Paintings of Caroline Clowes, for which she served as co-author for the accompanying catalogue.
Images
Attributed to Faith Trumbull (1743–1775), Needlework Picture, Boston and Lebanon, Connecticut, 1754. Silk, mica, and gouache on silk, 23 1/8 x 54 in. Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Hartford, 1974.99.0
Registration
Space is limited; advance registration is required. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing virtual programming.
Instructions for joining with a Zoom link and password will be provided by email upon registration confirmation under “Additional Information.”
Closed captioning will be provided in English.
For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.