Photo Credit: American Folk Art Museum & 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
This fall, the American Folk Art Museum presents 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, Locating Girlhood 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, the exhibition offers one of the most significant explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled.
“The American Folk Art Museum has long championed the creative achievements of American girls and young women,” said Jason T. Busch, the Museum’s Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO. “Since our founding, the Museum has played a leading role in advancing the study and appreciation of these artworks through landmark exhibitions, scholarship, and publications led by pioneering figures in the field. As the nation commemorates its 250th anniversary, Locating Girlhood offers a timely opportunity to look anew at these extraordinary objects and the layered histories they embody.”
“This exhibition and the accompanying publication seek to shed new light on the rich yet underexplored genre of early American ‘schoolgirl’ art. Building on foundational scholarship that identified makers, teachers, and schools, Locating Girlhood turns attention to broader questions of place, identity, and experience. We ask not only who created these works, but why girls made them and what they reveal about their lives and worlds,” added Emelie Gevalt, PhD, AFAM’s Deborah Davenport & Stewart Stender Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer.
Locating Girlhood features nearly a hundred works drawn from AFAM’s collection in addition to more than two dozen institutions and private collections, among them: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, the DAR Museum, Northwestern University Libraries, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. Because of their fragility and sensitivity to light, many of these works are rarely exhibited, making this a unique opportunity to experience them firsthand.
Admission to the American Folk Art Museum is always free.
