After-Hours Tour of the American Folk Art Museum

Event Highlights:

• Explore the new exhibit, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art
• View over 100 works from AFAM’s collection and loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, the DAR Museum, Northwestern University Libraries, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History
• Learn about celebrated masterpieces as well as remarkable lesser-known gems rarely seen by the public
• See a kaleidoscopic variety of media expressing love of country while also revealing the complexities and contradictions embedded in such expressions in the exhibit, Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States

❤️ Ticket sales go to the museum!

About the American Folk Art Museum:

Founded in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum is the nation’s museum of folk and self-taught art. Candid, genuine, and unexpected, AFAM celebrates the creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined largely through personal experience rather than formal artistic training. With a collection spanning 7,500 works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent, the Museum engages people of all backgrounds through its collections, exhibitions, publications, and public programs as the leading forum shaping the understanding and appreciation of folk and self-taught art.

About the Fall Exhibits:

On view this fall are two exhibitions, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art and Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States.

Locating Girlhood reexamines the often-overlooked artistic production of girls and young women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, highlighting their sustained engagement with representations of place long before the emergence of more widely recognized traditions of American landscape art. Bringing together loans from institutions and private collections across the United States and Canada, the exhibition offers one of the most significant explorations of early American girls’ artistic achievement ever assembled.

Folk Nation draws from the Museum’s rich collections to explore the connections between vernacular art and the construction of an American sense of self. A Museum Educator will lead a tour exploring both exhibitions.

About Your Guide, Nicole Haroutunian:

Nicole Haroutunian has worked at the American Folk Art Museum since 2008. As Senior Educator, she leads school, family, private, public, and access programs. Her objective is always to ensure that each museum visitor feels welcomed, heard, and valued, and has their unique needs met. She particularly enjoys facilitating the museum's ongoing partnership with the supportive art studio ArTech and creating art-centered writing workshops.

In addition to her work at AFAM, Nicole is a member of the education department at the Noguchi Museum, where she teaches school, private, and access programs, as well as the early childhood program Art for Tots and the caregiver-centered Stroller Tours. In her over two decades in museum education, she also has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, The Morgan Library and Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere. Nicole holds a BA in Studio Art from Vassar College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

She programs and hosts the monthly reading series "Story Time" for Caregivers at the Astoria Bookshop, has published her fiction widely, and, as a freelance writer, has had numerous podcasts scripts and audiobooks produced. She is the author of Choose This Now (Noemi Press, 2024), which was named a best short story collection of the year by Electric Literature, and Speed Dreaming (Little a, 2015). She is at work on her third book.

Image Credits:

• Ruthy Rogers (1778–1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, c. 1789. Silk on linen, 10½ × 9 in. American Folk Art Museum, Gift of Ralph Esmerian.
• Mary King, Needlework Picture (Tree of Life), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1754. Silk, metallic thread, and glass beads on silk, 18 × 24½ in. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont.
• Uncle Sam Riding a Bicycle Whirligig, probably New York State, 1880–1920. Paint on wood with metal, 37 × 55½ × 11 in. American Folk Art Museum, Gift of Dorothea and Leo Rabkin.

This post contains affiliate links, which means Untapped New York earns a commission. There is no extra cost to you and the commissions earned help support our mission of independent journalism!