Exhibition Tour

Featuring spectacular examples of needlework and other ornamental arts made by American girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art sheds new light on a rich but understudied genre, offering one of the most significant presentations on the subject in recent memory. This major loan exhibition brings together approximately 100 exceptional objects from over 35 museums and private collections nationwide, uniting celebrated masterpieces with remarkable lesser-known gems rarely seen by the public.

Drawing its subtitle, Past Continuous, from a 1976 painting by Krasner, the exhibition traces parallel lives and practices—forged first by lived experience, then shadowed by memory. Krasner, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from what is now Ukraine, and Pollock, raised in Los Angeles and the American West, brought specific geographies and inheritances into a shared artistic context. Their early paths traced distinct strands of American modernism that would ultimately converge in the rupture known as Abstract Expressionism, a movement that valued the translation of inner feelings into dramatic visual action. In the wake of World War II, artists asked why art mattered and what it could be. For Pollock, his breakthrough was the “drip” technique, a radical mode of painting that flourished in a condensed but prolific period. Krasner’s varied practice was typified by ceaseless explorations of abstraction, often cued by her abiding interest in the possibilities of nature and color.