American Folk Art Museum Exhibition Reexamines Early American Schoolgirl Art

NEW YORK, N.Y. — September 2026 —

The American Folk Art Museum in New York City is presenting a major new exhibition, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art, offering collectors and scholars an unprecedented look at the artistic output of girls and young women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The exhibition arrives during the U.S. semiquincentennial and positions this long-underexamined body of work within the broader history of American landscape art, arguing that these young makers engaged with representations of place well before the traditions now widely celebrated in that canon took hold.

Drawing on loans from institutions and private collections across the United States and Canada, Locating Girlhood is among the most comprehensive explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled in a single venue. The exhibition broadens the historical record by presenting works by Black and Native American students alongside those of white students, offering a more inclusive and historically accurate portrait of who was making art in America’s early academies and seminaries.

For collectors with an interest in needleworks, samplers, and ornamental arts, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity to view exceptional examples of schoolgirl work in a scholarly context, with curatorial interpretation that illuminates the geographic, cultural, and personal identities encoded in these objects. The works on view represent a category of American decorative art that has attracted serious collecting attention for decades, and this exhibition makes a compelling case for their place at the center, not the margins, of early American art history.

A fully illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition, available through the museum. For press materials, image resources, and a full press kit, the American Folk Art Museum has made a digital archive available online. The museum is located at 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023. Media inquiries may be directed to Mitch Case, Director of Communications and Audience Development, at mitchcase@folkartmuseum.org or 443.745.3502. folkartmuseum.org/programs