American Folk Art Museum

American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square
New York , NY 10023
United States

NOW ON VIEW

Highlights from the Historical Society of Early American Decoration

From: 
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Until: 
Tuesday, January 1, 2030

What That Quilt Knows About Me

From: 
Friday, March 17, 2023
Until: 
Sunday, October 29, 2023

Material Witness: Folk and Self-Taught Artists at Work

From: 
Friday, March 17, 2023
Until: 
Sunday, October 29, 2023

UPCOMING EVENTS

Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North

From: 
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Until: 
Sunday, March 24, 2024

PAST EVENTS

Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered

From: 
Friday, September 23, 2022
Until: 
Sunday, January 29, 2023

Pushing Boundaries: 60 Years of AFAM Exhibitions

From: 
Friday, September 23, 2022
Until: 
Sunday, January 29, 2023

Multitudes

From: 
Monday, January 17, 2022
Until: 
Monday, September 5, 2022

Six Decades Collecting Self-Taught Art

From: 
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Until: 
Sunday, January 2, 2022

American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds

From: 
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Until: 
Sunday, January 2, 2022

PHOTO/BRUT collection Bruno Decharme & compagnie

From: 
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Until: 
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Presidents Quilt, Clara J. Martin

American Perspectives: Highlights from the American Folk Art Museum

From: 
Monday, February 10, 2020
Until: 
Sunday, January 3, 2021

Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler

From: 
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Until: 
Sunday, January 26, 2020

Wall Power

From: 
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Until: 
Sunday, September 1, 2019

Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art

From: 
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Until: 
Sunday, July 28, 2019

A Kingdom in Pieces

From: 
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Until: 
Friday, March 29, 2019

John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night

From: 
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Until: 
Sunday, February 24, 2019

Paa Joe: Gates of No Return

From: 
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Until: 
Sunday, February 24, 2019

Charting the Divine Plan: The Art of Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863)

From: 
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Until: 
Sunday, October 14, 2018

Holding Space: The Museum Collects

From: 
Monday, March 5, 2018
Until: 
Thursday, July 5, 2018

Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic

From: 
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Until: 
Sunday, May 27, 2018

War and Pieced: The Annette Gero Collection of Quilts from Military Fabrics

From: 
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
Until: 
Sunday, January 7, 2018

War and Pieced is the first exhibition in the United States to showcase the spectacularly complex geometric quilts made exclusively by men using richly dyed wools derived from British military and dress uniforms. Once termed “Soldiers'” or “Convalescent Quilts,” the pieced textiles are most closely associated with the Crimean War as well as conflicts in India, South Africa, and other troubled regions of the British Empire during the nineteenth century.

Eugen Gabritschevsky: Morphology of the Imperceptible

From: 
Monday, March 13, 2017
Until: 
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Carlo Zinelli

Carlo Zinelli (1916-1974)

From: 
Monday, March 13, 2017
Until: 
Sunday, August 13, 2017

Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America

From: 
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Until: 
Sunday, February 26, 2017

Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett

From: 
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Until: 
Sunday, September 18, 2016

Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die

From: 
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Until: 
Sunday, September 18, 2016

Spring Fling: Quilts from the Collection

From: 
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Until: 
Sunday, June 5, 2016

Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection

From: 
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Until: 
Sunday, May 8, 2016

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet

From: 
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Until: 
Sunday, January 10, 2016

When the Curtain Never Comes Down

From: 
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Until: 
Sunday, July 5, 2015

A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America

From: 
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Until: 
Sunday, March 8, 2015

Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget

From: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Until: 
Sunday, November 30, 2014

Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic

From: 
Friday, September 5, 2014
Until: 
Sunday, November 30, 2014

Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum

From: 
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Until: 
Sunday, August 17, 2014

Folk Couture: Fashion and Folk Art

From: 
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Until: 
Wednesday, April 23, 2014

This exhibition will explore the polemical yet fascinating ways in which fashion engages with art. Conceived as an encounter between two worlds of creative endeavor, “Folk Couture” will feature the work of thirteen established and emerging designers who will create an original ensemble based on a selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, quilts, and furniture chosen from the museum’s outstanding collection. The designers have selected approximately thirty artworks, drawn from every time period and in every medium considered by the museum, not only for their potential fashionability and capacity to inspire new styles of clothing but also for their background stories that inject powerful notes of intimacy and authenticity. The original couture and the works of art from the museum's collection will be exhibited together in juxtapositions that promise to be both stunning and provocative.

Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collection of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

From: 
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Until: 
Sunday, September 22, 2013

Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections

From: 
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Until: 
Sunday, September 22, 2013

Recent Gifts

From: 
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Until: 
Sunday, September 22, 2013

Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed

From: 
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Until: 
Sunday, May 26, 2013

Foiled: Tinsel Painting in America

From: 
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Until: 
Sunday, January 13, 2013

Ooh, Shiny!

From: 
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Until: 
Sunday, January 13, 2013

Jubilation | Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined

From: 
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Until: 
Saturday, September 22, 2012

Life is not lived in black and white: reality may have the tinge of dreams and dreams an air of reality. This provocative tension exists between the experiential nature of early American folk art and the fantastical imagery it often displays—between what is real and what is imagined. The same is true of the work of contemporary self-taught artists, which may introduce unique—and sometimes puzzling—expressions that illuminate the iconoclastic nature that is the flip side of the collective American psyche. The viewer is placed in the peculiar but exhilarating position of deciding for him- or herself whether the artwork expresses a disjuncture with reality or an uninhibited embracing of interior life. After all, what is more true, the picture that looks real or the picture that feels real; the observer or the observed? These perceptions shift as new scholarship emerges. Often, real-life roots are discovered for even arcane and esoteric imagery that has already influenced our response to an artist and his work: does this disappoint or satisfy the viewer? Diminish or enhance the creativity of the artist? One need only contemplate the culture- and memory-driven gestures of Martín Ramírez, the impressionistic nineteenth-century portraits by Dr. and Mrs. Shute, and minimalist mid-twentieth-century soot drawings by James Castle to render these distinctions immaterial. Instead the viewer is urged to enjoy the permeable fluidity between art and imagination, dream and belief.

Stacy C. Hollander
Senior Curator

Super Stars: Quilts from the American Folk Art Museum

From: 
Monday, November 15, 2010
Until: 
Saturday, December 31, 2011