America's Tapestry: Stitching the Story of a Nation's Founding
Independence Day is usually marked in fireworks and flags. This year, as the United States marks 250 years since its founding, it's also being marked in Williamsburg through needle and thread, with an exhibition telling that story through embroidery rather than the usual rhetoric.
America's Tapestry, open now at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary until 6 September, brings together thirteen hand-embroidered panels, one for each of the original colonies. Each was stitched communally by artisans from New Hampshire to Georgia, and each tells a story chosen for what it adds to the standard account of the Revolution rather than what it repeats.
'Virginia', by the Williamsburg Rose and Thistle Chapter of the Embroiderers' Guild of America.
The Virginia panel, worked at the Muscarelle by the Williamsburg Rose and Thistle Chapter of the Embroiderers' Guild of America under Catherine Theron, illustrates the lead mines of Wythe County, which supplied musket balls to the Continental Army using enslaved, convicted and imported labour. Its central figure is Aberdeen, an enslaved man who defied his Loyalist master's orders and enlisted with the Continental Army after seven years in the mine, earning his freedom in return.
'North Carolina' panel.
Elsewhere, Georgia's panel honours the Chasseurs Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a Haitian militia unit of formerly enslaved and free soldiers. New York's depicts Black Loyalists whose service to the Crown secured their evacuation to Nova Scotia. North Carolina's marks the Edenton Tea Party, among the earliest recorded acts of political protest by women in North America.
'Pennsylvania' panel.
Connecticut's panel follows Hannah Bunce Watson, the first female editor of the Hartford Courant; Delaware's traces Henry Fisher's naval defence of Delaware Bay; Pennsylvania's centres on Rebecca Young, one of the first documented makers of an American flag.
A group of artisan stitchers, part of the 'America's Tapestry' project, displaying work in progress.
The project is the work of textile scholar and designer Stefan Romero, who traces its origins to The Great Tapestry of Scotland, the community project depicting twelve thousand years of Scottish history across 160 panels. Romero has spoken of watching novice stitchers work alongside guild veterans, each contributing whatever hours they could spare over the course of a year, until skill levels became difficult to tell apart in the finished panels. "It's special to see people come together across so many regions to tell these stories with their hands," he has said, noting that the work produced would typically take three or four times as long through more conventional means.
'Rhode Island' panel.
Muscarelle director David Brashear frames the appeal similarly, suggesting the panels make the struggle for independence feel more immediate by working through individual lives rather than familiar national narratives.
After Williamsburg, the tapestries begin a two-year tour taking in each of the original thirteen states, starting with Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New Hampshire, alongside programming that invites visitors to try the needlework themselves. It runs at the Muscarelle until 6 September.
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Further Information:
America's Tapestry, is on show now at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, until 6 September 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: 'New Jersey' panel (detail), as featured in the America's Tapestry exhibition, Muscarelle Museum of Art.
All further images as credited in captions.