Locating Girlhood, Place and identity in Early American "School Girl" Art, Emelie Gevalt and Caroline Culp

Locating Girlhood brings together nearly 100 examples of needlework, watercolours, drawings, and other ornamental works made by American girls and young women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on objects from more than 35 museums and private collections, the book examines these often-overlooked works through the lens of place, revealing how landscapes, city scenes, maps, and other representations of the world around them became expressions of personal, regional, and national identity.

Published alongside a major exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, the volume offers a fresh art-historical perspective on “schoolgirl art” and its place within the wider history of American landscape and material culture. It also considers the colonial and early federal ideas that shaped these young artists’ understanding of their surroundings, placing women and girls at the centre of a story traditionally dominated by male landscape painters.

About the Authors

Emelie Gevalt is Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Her research encompasses early American portraiture, landscape, decorative painting, textiles, African American representation, and histories of collecting and collective memory.

Caroline Culp is Warren Family Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum, specialising in colonial and early national painting, material culture, and women artists. She has held curatorial positions at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Publication date: September 2026
Publisher: Skira
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9788857255170
Size: 24 × 28 cm
Format: Hardback