When most people hear the term “masterpiece,” they imagine an object of exceptional beauty, craftsmanship, or historical importance. But who decides what qualifies as a masterpiece? And how have those decisions shaped our understanding of American history?
These questions are at the center of Challenging Masterpieces: Art and Identity in American Furniture, a major exhibition opening at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library on September 26, 2026. The exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Americana Foundation because it aligns closely with our American Heritage program priority of broadening the stories told about America’s early days through early American art and material culture.
For more than a century, collectors, museums, and scholars have elevated certain forms of American furniture as the highest expressions of artistic achievement. Ornate furniture produced in major urban centers—particularly along the East Coast—often became the standard against which other objects were judged. As a result, furniture associated with rural communities, immigrant populations, women collectors and scholars, regional traditions, and other historically overlooked groups frequently received less attention.
Winterthur's exhibition examines how this happened and invites visitors to take a fresh look at long-standing assumptions about value, craftsmanship, and historical significance.
The exhibition begins with some of the iconic objects that helped establish the traditional furniture canon, including the celebrated Van Pelt high chest shown in the image above. The piece helped establish American furniture as a collecting category worthy of serious attention and played an important role in shaping what museums and collectors came to regard as a masterpiece.
From there, visitors will find other furniture masterpieces in Winterthur’s renowned collections alongside objects that have often remained at the margins of scholarship and interpretation, such as painted furniture, pieces from under-represented regions such as the American South and Midwest, furniture that reflects global influences, furniture at the boundaries of professional shop production, and folk art. Placing traditional masterpieces in conversation with a wider range of objects invites visitors to see the creativity, craftsmanship, and design ingenuity of American furniture—and the history it represents—in a broader and more inclusive way.
Importantly, Winterthur is not simply adding overlooked objects to an existing narrative. The exhibition asks a more fundamental question: whether the criteria traditionally used to identify "masterpieces" reflect objective measures of quality or the preferences and biases of earlier generations of collectors and institutions.
That question is especially timely as museums across the country reconsider how they interpret their collections and tell stories about the American past. While many institutions have worked to broaden representation in recent years, Winterthur's project focuses on a field—American furniture scholarship—that some believe has changed more slowly than other areas of museum interpretation.
The exhibition will be accompanied by educational programming, a scholarly symposium, and a publication designed to extend its impact beyond Winterthur's galleries. Together, these efforts aim not only to engage museum visitors but also to stimulate ongoing conversation among scholars, collectors, and cultural institutions about how American material culture is studied and presented.
At the Americana Foundation, we are particularly interested in projects that deepen public understanding of early American history while bringing forward perspectives that have traditionally received less attention. Challenging Masterpieces demonstrates how even familiar objects can reveal new stories when viewed through a different lens.