Enfilade

Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819, oil on canvas, 147 × 207 inches
(Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 03.1079)

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Opening soon at the MFABoston:

America at 250

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opening 19 June 2026

The MFA’s major reinstallation of the 18th-century Art of the Americas galleries will integrate art from across North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean—including works by Native American and Indigenous makers—to present a broader view of cultural exchange across the continent during a pivotal time in history. The galleries feature more than 400 objects—including icons of the MFA’s collection, long unseen works, and new acquisitions—that range from the monumental to the miniature.

Paul Revere Jr., Sons of Liberty Bowl, 1768, silver (MFA Boston).

A silver bowl. A Founding Father memorialized at monumental scale. A charismatic silversmith considering his craft. A towering mahogany desk and bookcase. Certain paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and works on paper from the MFA’s Art of the Americas art collection, along with the artists who created them, played a pivotal role in shaping the early history of the United States. Today, as we approach 250 years since the country’s founding, they likewise have a unique ability to recount and reflect that history while also inviting us to reconsider it.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of American Independence, the MFA is reimagining its 18th-century galleries on level one of the Art of the Americas Wing for the first time since they opened in 2010. The new display, which opens in June 2026, brings together works from across the Americas—integrating Native and non-native, North, South, and Central American, and Caribbean art—and explores how artists have contributed to, or in some cases resisted, ideas of nationhood and identity. Visitors can immerse themselves in a range of stories and experiences, discovering the interconnectedness of the Americas and its history, institutions, and people.

Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington (1796)—the foundational image of the nation’s first president in the public imagination—offers viewers a prescient reminder that democracy is constant work in progress. An early piece of American protest art, Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768) honors a group of Massachusetts rebels who paved the way for the Revolution. A ceramic jar (1857) by the enslaved potter and poet David Drake exemplifies literacy as an act of resistance in the decades before the Civil War. Thomas Sully drew on artistic traditions of heroism for The Passage of the Delaware (1819), which portrays George Washington in a dramatic scene of bravery. Meanwhile, a recently acquired work by Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, offers a contemporary critique of Washington, who was known to the Mohawk Nation as ‘Town Destroyer’. These and the many other works on view reveal a past in dialogue with the present and propose endless possibilities for assessing history as we look ahead to the future.

Excelsior with Allegorical Figures of Liberty and Justice, late 18th century.

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This summer the museum will also present its own unique copy of the Declaration, as Jennifer Schuessler reports in The New York Times (5 June 2026) . . .

“For generations, the institution (formerly the New-York Historical Society) has quietly held a rare, unattributed broadside of the Declaration, one of only a handful with no printer’s name attached. From June 18 to July 5, it will be on public display for the first time, along with a tentative attribution, to a New York City printer named Samuel Loudon.”

From the press release for the exhibition:

Revolutionary Women

The New York Historical, 29 May — 25 October 2026

Curated by Anna Danziger Halperin, Tessa Bangs, Isabelle Held, Rachel Pitkin, and Lauren Cain

Commemorating the nation’s semiquincentennial year, The New York Historical presents Revolutionary Women, a new exhibition on view in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery. Moving beyond the myths and legends that have long shaped narratives of the American founding, this exhibition draws on extensive research in The Historical’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library to illuminate the lives of the women who helped define the American experiment. Through the close examination of overlooked primary sources—including letters, financial ledgers, and archaeological artifacts such as shoe soles and children’s toys excavated from military camps—Revolutionary Women reconstructs a compelling, evidence-based reappraisal of the 18th century, positioning women as central actors in the political, social, and economic transformations of the era.

“To understand the history of our nation, we must look at what is revealed in the margins of the traditional narrative,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO, The New York Historical. “This exhibition moves past symbolism to center the real expertise and labor of women who navigated a world of blurred allegiances to help found the United States. By unearthing these hidden contributions, we hope to shift how the American Revolution is understood for generations to come.”

At its core, the exhibition cuts through 250 years of mythmaking to reveal the documented realities behind iconic Revolutionary-era women. It spotlights figures such as Deborah Sampson, whose story of military enlistment was amplified in early print culture, alongside Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley Peters, who wielded Enlightenment ideals to expose the contradictions of a male-dominated republic. The exhibition also dismantles enduring legends like ‘Molly Pitcher’, revealing the figure likely to have been a composite of several women, including Margaret Corbin (‘Captain Molly’), the first woman to receive a federal pension after being wounded in combat, as confirmed by military and Board of War records. Drawing on rich archival evidence, including a public tribute from George Washington to widows who helped American prisoners, Revolutionary Women replaces folklore with a vivid, verifiable account of women’s central role in the time of America’s founding.

Using the New York region as a microcosm of the broader struggle for independence, the exhibition reveals the breadth of women’s economic and civic influence in a contested landscape. As men went to war, women assumed control of businesses, carried intelligence across military lines, and sustained the conflict through medical and logistical support. Archival materials, including the business records of merchant Mary Alexander, underscore women’s longstanding participation in transatlantic trade networks. Evidence from early ledgers of the Tontine Coffee House—the heart of early New York’s financial district—further documents women such as Rebecca Gomez as active investors and stakeholders, offering a powerful corrective to narratives that have long excluded women from the growing early American financial system.

For women of color and Indigenous women, whose voices were often suppressed by dominant narratives, Revolutionary Women reinterprets traditional sources to foreground their agency and resilience, telling the story of individuals like Elizabeth ‘Mumbet’ Freeman, whose court case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley (1781), set the legal precedent to abolish slavery in Massachusetts. Molly Brant, a Mohawk woman of the Wolf Clan, chose loyalty to the British over the Revolutionary forces, believing that it offered the best chance to protect Haudenosaunee lands from colonial expansion. The letter granting Brant a pension from the British government for her diplomatic service is on view. Meanwhile, soldiers’ orderly books and diaries from the Sullivan Campaign, while recording the destruction of Haudenosaunee lands, inadvertently preserve evidence of Indigenous women’s agricultural knowledge and authority.

Personal relationships are also explored in the exhibition. On display is a love poem written by Patriot Major Aquila Giles, who met his future wife, Eliza Shipton, the niece of a Loyalist, after he was captured. The star-crossed lovers secretly exchanged letters, and eloped in 1780 to thwart their impending separation. A woman’s shoe sole, children’s toys, and other archaeological evidence mark the presence of women and children in military camps and in occupied New York.

In the post-war years, women turned to the emerging legal system to assert their rights and redefine the boundaries of citizenship. Court records and legal depositions, like the property lawsuits of Elizabeth Rutgers, who sued for back rent when her brewery was occupied during the British occupation, demonstrate that women actively challenged the limits of the law.

The exhibition concludes by examining how women played a decisive role in building the social and economic infrastructure of the new nation. In the absence of robust public services, they established philanthropic and educational institutions that bound the city and nation together, while their wealth and labor provided an invisible backbone to the early republic’s economy. Acting as traders, financial participants, and diplomatic intermediaries, women sustained the nation’s daily operations, an often unrecognized foundation that Revolutionary Women brings to light, recasting their expertise as central rather than peripheral to the Revolutionary era. Through materials ranging from a sampler made at the New-York African Free-School to a portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, a founder of the Orphan Asylum Society—Revolutionary Women ultimately challenges audiences to reconsider whose stories endure, and to ask a vital question: How would you tell the story of the Revolution?

Revolutionary Women is curated by Anna Danziger Halperin, director for the Center for Women’s History; Tessa Bangs, Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History and Public History; Isabelle Held, Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History; and Rachel Pitkin and Lauren Cain, both Mellon Foundation Predoctoral Awardees in Women’s History.