Marking Identity: A Talk On Samplers with Lisa Bower

Lisa Bower, Assistant Curator, Nova Scotia Museum, explores the tradition of sampler-making among 19th-century schoolgirls in Nova Scotia, by highlighting how embroidered pictures composed of text and images served both as educational exercises and expressions of identity. Drawing on examples from the Nova Scotia Museum’s Prescott House collection, which features samplers made by white settler girls, the talk will also center a rare and powerful counterpoint—an 1845 sampler stitched by a student at Halifax’s African School. This extraordinary piece offers material evidence that sampler making was also a part of the Black schoolgirl experience with colonial education, identity expression and needlework production in Nova Scotia.