NEW YORK, NY.- The exhibition American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection is on view at the American Folk Art Museum. It will be on display through May 31, 2020, and showcases some seventy stellar works, all carefully culled from the museum’s collection by Stacy C. Hollander, former deputy director and chief curator of AFAM. Beginning in 2021, the exhibition will travel to additional venues in the United States.

“The artworks on view in American Perspectives will reveal multiple narratives,” said Jason T. Busch, director of the museum. “Stacy’s research has led to new discoveries about our collection and builds on the deep level of scholarship that is closely associated with her work as a curator. With Stacy’s engaging organization, visitors will see these objects in a new light.”

Curator Stacy C. Hollander commented, “Beautiful, diverse, and truthful, the works on view will illuminate the thoughts and experiences of individuals with an immediacy that is palpable and unique.”

Divided into four sections, the exhibition includes paintings, needlework, pottery, quilts, and sculpture. Artworks in the exhibition respond to such themes as nationhood, freedom, immigration, tolerance and intolerance, opportunity, and legacy, and offer firsthand testimony to chapters in the unfolding and ongoing story of the United States.

Among the works in the exhibition are:

• Jug by David Drake (c. 1800–c.1870). Drake, an enslaved person until Emancipation following the Civil War, lived at a time when it was unlawful to teach slaves to read and write. Yet, his history has been partially recovered, in large part because he embedded his sentiments through his name, dates, and poems inscribed into utilitarian pots intended to store food and drink, including the jug on view.

• Portrait of Frank Peters by Joseph P. Aulisio (1910–1974). Born in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, to Italian immigrants, Aulisio started Lease Dry Cleaners, where he employed Frank Peters as a tailor. The portrait is a remarkably unvarnished study of the architecture of flesh. Folds in Peters’ face appear both soft and hard, like molded plastic. Each gnarled knuckle and vein in his hands is delineated, testifying to his work as a tailor, and reinforced by the tape measure that he hugs fast against his body.

• Crazy Trousseau Robe by Emma Rebecca Cummins Blacklock Snively Crosier Pauling (1848–1923). Cummins lived a large life, belied by the dainty trousseau robe fashionable during the late nineteenth century. She was married four times, divorced twice, and worked as one of the first female railroad telegraphers in the American West.

• Freedom Quilt by Jessie B. Telfair (1913–1986). The concept of a freedom quilt can be traced at least as far back as the Civil War, when women were urged to “prick the slaveowner’s conscience” by embroidering antislavery slogans and images into their needlework. As a result of attempting to register to vote, Telfair lost her job as a cook at Helen Gurr Elementary School in Parrott, Georgia. She had learned to quilt from her mother, and after the trauma of losing her job, members of SNCC encouraged her to use her talent to frame a response to these overwhelming events.

• Outer Row Jumper Horse by Charles Carmel (1865–1931). In 1883, Charles Carmel became one of a handful of Jewish woodcarvers who fled the intolerance of Eastern Europe to find religious freedom and unlikely success in American as carvers of joyful and magical carousel animals for the burgeoning amusement industry.

• Mother Sister May Have Sat in That Chair When She Lived in This House Before Me by Jean-Marcel St. Jacques (b. 1972). In his series of “wooden quilts,” St. Jacques rehabilitates the ugliness of Hurricane Katrina. Using wood reclaimed from his damaged home and others in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, he pieces together expanses of wood, nails, and antique hardware on plywood wood to tell a story of endurance and beauty emerging from devastating events.