The Abraham Pixler Family

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Decorative family records were commonly kept in American households during the nineteenth century. This one portrays members of Abraham Pixler’s family, with the parents, Abraham and Eve, at the top of the sheet and their three children, Absalom, David, and Levi, beneath them. The composition is conventional, as it follows the basic layout of countless family-record needlework pictures and pages of illuminated calligraphy, but also innovative in its use of portraits in place of the more commonly used names and symbols.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art