Museum of Work and Culture

America's Tapestry comes to the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, from July to October 2027, as part of the national tour that opened at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, in June 2026 and now travels the original thirteen colonies. Created to mark the nation's 250th anniversary and stitched by some 2,000 volunteers, the collection of thirteen needlework tapestries — one for each colony — will be on view here in a setting that speaks directly to the work of many hands.

Housed in a beautifully restored former textile mill in the Blackstone River Valley, the Museum of Work & Culture tells the story of the immigrants, especially the French-Canadians who left the farms of Quebec for the factory floors of Woonsocket, whose labor built the mill towns along the river. Its immersive exhibits carry visitors from a rural farmhouse to a mill shop floor, a triple-decker tenement porch, a 1920s classroom, and a union hall, honoring the grit, faith, and craft traditions of Rhode Island's working people. It is a fitting home for tapestries that were themselves made stitch by stitch, and that pay tribute to the patience and skill of ordinary volunteers.

There is a special resonance in showing the collection in Rhode Island, home to one of the thirteen panels. Rhode Island was among the earliest and boldest voices for independence — on May 4, 1776, two months before the Declaration, it became the first colony to formally renounce its allegiance to King George III. To see the full tapestry here, in the state's own words and needlework, is to stand where that history was lived.