The American Folk Art Museum Is Staging One of the Most Significant Shows of American Girls' Art Ever Assembled

• "Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American Schoolgirl Art" opens October 9, 2026, and runs through February 28, 2027

• Nearly 100 works from more than two dozen institutions and private collections across the U.S. and Canada

• Lenders include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur Museum, and the DAR Museum

• Admission to the American Folk Art Museum is always free

When eighteenth-century girls were taught to sew samplers and stitch needlework pictures, they were also, it turns out, making landscape art. That connection forms the premise of "Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American Schoolgirl Art," the landmark exhibition the American Folk Art Museum opens on October 9, 2026. It runs through February 28, 2027.

The show brings together nearly 100 works, samplers, needlework pictures, watercolors, and other ornamental arts produced by girls and young women as part of their formal education during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These objects, historically grouped under the umbrella term "schoolgirl art," have not often been examined as landscape art. "Locating Girlhood" makes exactly that argument: that representations of place formed a persistent visual thread in this work long before a recognized tradition of American landscape painting emerged.

The exhibition draws from more than two dozen institutions and private collections across the United States and Canada. Named lenders include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the DAR Museum, Northwestern University Libraries, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. The range of lenders is one indication of the show's institutional ambition. This is not a collection deep-dive; it is a survey built from objects that have largely been held separately.

The subjects across the works reflect the range of place-based imagery girls were taught to produce: pastoral landscapes, formal gardens, cityscapes, maps, and geographic motifs that evolved through the period to track shifts in social values and aspiration.

The museum is presenting "Locating Girlhood" during the nation's semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of American independence. That context is deliberate. The exhibition reexamines a category of American artistic production that has been overlooked rather than celebrated, placing these girls' and young women's work in a line of American landscape art rather than treating it as a separate, lesser category.

For the American Folk Art Museum, whose 7,500-object collection spans four centuries and nearly every continent, "Locating Girlhood" represents one of the most significant thematic exhibitions in its recent history. The objects are formally beautiful. The argument they make together is the reason to see the show.

The museum is located at 2 Lincoln Square in Manhattan. folkartmuseum.org

Admission is free.