Passaic County Arts Center

America's Tapestry comes to the Passaic County Arts Center in Hawthorne, New Jersey, from October to December 2026, one stop on a national tour that opened at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, in June 2026 and travels the original thirteen colonies through 2028. The collection of thirteen needlework tapestries — one for each colony, stitched by some two thousand volunteers to mark the nation's 250th anniversary — will be on view in a setting that is itself a piece of American history: the John W. Rea House, a residence built around 1810 and now carefully restored as a public gallery within Goffle Brook Park. Listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places, the house was adapted into an arts center with quiet attention to its past, from replicated shutters and railings to a rebuilt 1930s garden wall — work that earned a New Jersey State Historic Preservation Award in 2020.

There is a particular fitness in New Jersey hosting the tour, for the state is home to one of the thirteen panels, and to bring it to Passaic County is in a sense to bring it home. The county's own Department of Cultural and Historic Affairs — the same body that operates the Arts Center — served as the historical advisor for the New Jersey tapestry, and much of its research centered on the nearby Dey Mansion. The panel depicts women on the home front in 1780: the Dey family supporting Continental soldiers while hosting General Washington, the "Ladies of Trenton" raising funds for the army, and a military surgeon administering smallpox inoculations at a Trenton hospital. New Jersey, long called the Crossroads of the American Revolution, saw more of the war's fighting than any other colony, and this panel tells a quieter part of that story.

Operated by the County of Passaic, the Arts Center presents gallery exhibitions, classes, and public programs, and admission is free. Visitors are warmly welcome to see America's Tapestry alongside the historic house that holds it during the exhibition's run this autumn.