Students’ backpacks often overflow with creative projects—paper plates, cotton balls, and popsicle sticks transformed into cute animals or seasonal decorations (all sprinkled with an inevitable layer of glitter). Some of these creations land on the fridge, while others find their way to the recycling bin. Art supplies are cheap and easy to find, allowing us to create more and keep less.

In early America, experiences looked much different, and students didn’t use as many basic staples like paper and crayons. Even the most prestigious schools possessed limited materials, saving them for important projects. Needlework—intricate silk-on-linen or silk-on-silk designs—could teach girls multiple skills in addition to sewing. From these pieces, young girls learned the alphabet, numbers, and even moral teachings from scripture and literature. For these projects, merchants imported silk from China at a significant cost. Students spent months completing samplers and embroideries, proudly displaying them in their homes and passing them down from one generation to the next.

Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery tells the story of the schoolgirls—and their teachers—who created masterpieces that required not just skill, but diligence. Here, the show’s curator, Ken Myers, Department Head, American Art, talks about the significance of needlework both in schools and in society at large. The exhibition is on view now through June 15, 2025.

What prompted the Painted with Silk exhibition?

For almost 20 years I’ve known a local couple who have built a remarkable collection of American folk art, with especially strong holdings of needlework by American schoolgirls. The needleworks are fascinating, in part because they were often made by very young girls. And they can be very beautiful. Initially, I proposed a show of 25 objects. When I shared the idea with the DIA director, he encouraged me to expand it into a much bigger exhibition. Since the first collectors did not have enough material to fill the larger space, they introduced me to two other pairs of collectors. The exhibition now includes 59 historical pieces — two from the mid-1600s, 58 from between 1735 and 1835, and 11 contemporary samplers by artist Elaine Riechek that adapt the form of the historic samplers.

Printed images were expensive, so that society would have been image poor in comparison to today. We take images for granted. They're trivial. We all carry phones with an infinite number of images on them. So, framed needlework would have been one of the most visible decorative objects in a house. Depending on the wealth of the family, maybe they owned some portraits and prints on the wall, but there wouldn't have been a lot, even in 1830. So, these embroideries would have been impressive works, which is one reason why so many of them survived. They became family heirlooms.

How was sewing both a practical skill and a symbolic skill in girls’ education in the 1700s and 1800s?

Methods for teaching reading and writing began to change in the 1830s, but until then writing was taught separately from reading, and many girls from poor or working-class families were not taught how to write. The simplest samplers were made with silk thread on linen and contained little more than letters (scripts and print) and numbers. If they stayed in school long enough, girls might make more complicated samplers that included images and quotations. Some of these include alphabets and numbers, but many didn’t. The most advanced works, which we refer to as embroideries rather than samplers, are made with silk threads on a silk support, often with sections painted with watercolor. These were produced by girls from the wealthiest families who were able to attend the most elite schools in the most cosmopolitan cities—Boston, Hartford, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Completion of a complicated sampler and pictorial embroideries took time, diligence, and self-control, all valued skills expected of well-to-do and wealthy young girls and women. For these girls and women, the completed embroidery served as a kind of diploma, which is why they were often framed and displayed in prominent places in their homes. Which is also why so many of them survive.

Embroidery was a potentially marketable skill, so if they ever needed to support themselves or their families, women who had learned to embroider could turn use their skill to make money. But that would not have been the case for most of the girls who made the samplers and pictorial embroideries in Painting with Silk. Most of those girls may have used their skill to do some mending but would have depended on servants or professional seamstresses to make their clothes and household linens.

Most of the embroideries in the exhibition emphasize the importance of leading a virtuous life, which meant being hardworking, diligent, and obeying appropriate authority — teacher, mother, father, God. They also reinforced many gender assumptions of the day, preparing the girls to be dutiful wives and mothers who would assist their husbands and raise the children to be virtuous citizens.

Many of the embroideries deal with death, either by incorporating quotations about death, or by picturing tombstones, or by representing scenes from the Bible or literature which deal with death.  The lesson taught by these embroideries was that life is short, death inevitable, so that the most important thing you can do in this life is to live virtuously so that after death your soul will go to heaven.

From the beginning of my work on the exhibition I knew that I wanted to emphasize the relationship between the girls and their teachers. We selected and organized works with the hope that the exhibition would attract school groups, parents with children, and grandparents with grandchildren. With those groups as target audiences, we knew that we wanted to stress the idea the opportunity to go to school should not be taken for granted—or wasted. Education is both an opportunity and a privilege. We thought that teachers, parents, and grandparents would appreciate that theme.

What are two of your favorite works by Contemporary Artist Elaine Reichek, and how do they contrast from the exhibition’s historical embroideries?

Reichek’s How Blest the Maid combines the “house and barn” pattern found in both Portsmouth, New Hampshire samplers in the exhibition with her variation on a short poem embroidered on several other samplers including Melancia Bowker’s from 1817:

How blest the maid whom circling years improve
Her God the object of her purest love...

But where the original verse pledged the child’s devotion to God, Reichek transformed the poem’s original meaning by pledging her devotion to her art:

How blest the maid
whom circling years improve
Her art the object of her warmest love...

Where the historic samplers taught children to put the needs of others ahead of their own wants and desires, Reichek declares, I am artist, and as an artist, I choose my own goals, not ones that are expected of me.

In all the historic materials, home is represented as a place of safety, security, and love. But we know that not all homes are happy. So, we ended the exhibition with a Reichek sampler that illustrates Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome (1911). The title character and his wife cannot escape their childless and loveless marriage. The Fromes are farmers, and the exaggerated horizontality of Reichek’s design emphasizes the lonely isolation of their snowbound farmhouse. The landscape is chilly and frozen, like their lives.

What questions do you hope visitors ask themselves as they walk through the exhibition?

I am ultimately a historian, and I'm interested in the ways in which our society is both unlike and like the societies in which the historical embroideries were produced. I'm hoping that Painted with Silk will provoke some thoughts about what it would have been like to be a young girl from a moderate to wealthy family in the years between 1730 and 1840. What opportunities would one have? What would your society be encouraging you to do with your life? But also, how am I, too, being encouraged to make something of my life today? In what ways are the pressures on me like those experienced by a young girl at earlier times in American history.

No one is completely free to form themselves. We are all formed by our societies before we gain the ability to question the assumptions and values that we've inherited. 

The girls who made these embroideries had less opportunity and freedom to refashion themselves than most of us do today. But like them, all of us have the ability, however limited it may sometimes be, to make choices about what we believe and value, and how we want to live our lives.