Editor’s Introduction

A scholar as well as a needlepainter, Georgiana Brown Harbeson produced a critically important yet little studied volume only a few years after Bolton and Coe. Her 1938 book American Needlework sutured the past and the present in entirely new ways. Perhaps following Wheeler’s 1921 survey, Harbeson also began with Indigenous needlework, although her rhetoric, like Wheeler’s, was both discriminatory and demeaning. Harbeson’s survey was also partially an act of self-promotion, documenting contemporary needle art by herself, Marguerite Zorach, and others. It is no surprise that Bolton and Coe are far better known today than Harbeson, as their American Samplers, appearing just before the sesquicentennial, played to the laudatory nature of American exceptionalism. Harbeson’s work was far from exempt from similar tones, but her survey offered a different context.