Exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City opening October 9 and continuing into 2027. On display are nearly 100 examples of schoolgirl art – samplers, needlework pictures, family registers, maps of the world, painted furniture, and watercolor studies. All were carefully selected for their connection to the exhibition’s central theme of “Locating Girlhood” – their place in the world around them and their identity within society and family. Curated by Emily Gevalt and Caroline Culp, the exhibition “recalibrates the history of art in the United States by opening up its timeline to acknowledge young female creators, including young women of color.” 

An exhibition of nineteenth-century Mexican samplers at the Allen Memorial Museum on the Oberlin College campus in Ohio. The exhibition opened July 25, 2026 and will continue until May 23, 2027. On display are a group of Mexican embroidered samplers from a 1942 donation to the museum by Amos B. McNairy (1854-1942). According to the donor, the samplers were produced by girls living in the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Jalisco. The dates range from the 1830s to 1870. Curators Marlise Brown and Natalia Alvarado note that the exhibition’s samplers “combine aspects of both European and American stitch techniques with iconography and patterns that have origins in indigenous Aztec visual culture.”

Exhibition of samplers and needlework pictures at the Webb Deane Stevens Museum, guest-curated by Emily Whitted with collaboration from Stephen & Carol Huber. This exhibition brings together more than fifty examples of schoolgirl art drawn from public and private collections across the country. Together the embroideries trace the rich legacy of girls’ needlework in America from the 18^th to mid -19^th centuries, documenting the educational, artistic, practical, and deeply personal efforts of generations of girls and young women.

On display at Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, England is an exhibition of outstanding Tudor embroideries from the Lord Middleton Collection. The exhibition, titled “Peapods and Gillyflowers”showcases fourteen items from his collection, each made between 1580 and 1650. The embroideries are covered with motifs from nature – the flowers, herbs, vegetables, insects and animals that were a popular feature of late 16^th and 17^th century English embroidery.

The Northwest Sampler Guild hosted a zoom lecture by Alexandra Peters on September 26, 11:00 am Pacific Time (2:00 pm ET). The topic is Quaker samplers – samplers by girls of Quaker families or by girls going to a Quaker school. Alexandra Peters will talk about both the British and American Quaker samplers in her own collection, including a rare Westtown globe. Of special note are “samplers sets”, more than one Quaker sampler made by the same girl. Some of the samplers were made as gifts for the Quaker women who supported the Female Association Schools of New York City, founded to provide a free education to girls from impoverished families. Free to members of the Northwest Sampler Guild.

Dr. Lynne Anderson uses the presence of needlework instruction to trace and interpret the educational opportunities in Philadelphia for free and enslaved black girls. Through the lens of known and recently discovered samplers stitched by girls of African descent, she explores the educational options that emerged and the factors that motivated families within the city’s extensive free black community to pursue an education for their daughters.

Lecture by Emily Whitted, guest-curator of the exhibition American Girlhood: Needlework, Memory, and The Making of a Nation, exploring the larger history of needlework as part of early American education for girls. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, female education was a critical space for civic development, and needlework was one educational medium in which girls processed their own identities within the new nation. Tickets $10 for members, $15 for nonmembers.