Image: American Folk Art Museum, New York
The exhibition brings together needlework and other ornamental arts made by American girls and young women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The curatorial walkthrough highlights works on view in the galleries, including needlework, watercolors, painted furniture and other decorative objects.
‘Locating Girlhood’ approaches these objects through an explicitly art-historical perspective, reframing schoolgirl art through the lens of place. Its premise challenges a history of American landscape art traditionally centered on male academic painters by emphasizing that American girls and young women produced landscape scenes in samplers, needlework pictures, watercolors and related forms long before the rise of the Hudson River School. The exhibition considers landscapes, cityscapes, maps and other cartographic compositions as expressions of place, extending from the eighteenth century onward through works commonly grouped under the term “schoolgirl art.” By treating these works as deeply resonant expressions of place, it expands the story of the American landscape and situates women at its heart.
Timed to coincide with the US’s semiquincentennial, the exhibition both celebrates the creativity of early American girls and women and critically examines the colonial and early federal ideologies that structured their worldview.
