A couple appears making love on an appliquéd patchwork quilt that takes up half a painting’s surface. At the center of the quilt is a tulip, a symbol of faith rebirth that’s popular in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. Towards the bottom of the panel, one figure’s bare back appears, emblazoned with winged tattoos. Two hands grasp the shoulders, and a bare leg wraps around its waist. On the wall behind the headboard hang two framed folk art pieces—a geometric sampler and a pastoral scene.
This Anne Buckwalter painting, titled Angels (2026), exemplifies the artist’s characteristic juxtaposition of contemporary sexuality and regional folk art traditions. Now based in Maine, Buckwalter was raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Her family’s Swiss German roots go back to the late 1700s or 1800s. “In my work, the blending of these Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics with elements of sexuality and kink and queerness feels very personal to me,” the artist said during a recent conversation. “I think about the home as a psychological space, a place where these very intimate dramas can play out and also where contradictory elements can live together in harmony.”
The term “Pennsylvania Dutch” alone can breed a sense of confusion, conjuring visions of Mennonites, the Amish, and rural life, austerity, and mythology at once.“There’s a lot of muddied knowledge about this particular regional culture,” acknowledged Buckwalter.
Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery
The term itself is a misnomer. It derives from “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” meaning Pennsylvania German, a description that came to encompass waves of German and Swiss German immigrants who arrived in the region from the 17th to 19th centuries. This culture spans more traditional Amish and Mennonite communities as well as Lutheran and German Reformed congregations. The group is centered in Lancaster County, which became famous for its highly decorated folk art, painted furniture, embroidery samplers, hex signs—geometric and circular folk art painted on barns and buildings—and Fraktur, a kind of illuminated manuscript.
While Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics have deep historical roots, Buckwalter is among many contemporary women artists finding inspiration in its culture. Becky Suss, Rebecca Morgan, and Sarah McEneaney have all adopted formal qualities and imagery from the region. Meanwhile, rising painter Samantha Joy Groff takes a more direct, even anthropological approach by painting the contemporary women of Pennsylvania Dutch culture in her nocturnal, rural tableaux.
These artists share geographic and cultural ties to the region. They use its visual language to explore domesticity, sexuality, women’s work, and the nuances of cultural pride and shame.
Pennsylvania Dutch interiors
For Buckwalter and Suss, Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics are intrinsically tied to the home and childhood memory. Both artists paint interior domestic scenes with a flattened, warped perspective. In these spaces, they depict folk objects or family heirlooms that suggest memory, lineage, and loss.
“I pull a lot of things directly from my childhood home,” said Buckwalter, who will open “Heirloom,” a major institutional solo show at the Allentown Art Museum, on November 21st. An in-progress painting features a chair from her childhood home.
Suss, whose solo exhibition “Night House” is on view at Jack Shainman, New York, through October 31st, grew up just north of Philadelphia. She began painting interiors after her paternal grandfather died in 2011. Both grandparents had played a major role in her life, and she felt strange among their furniture after they were gone. Their Long Island ranch house was eventually sold and demolished, and Suss inherited its contents. Her earliest paintings offered remembrances of this space and functioned as “part set painting, like a stage backdrop, and part archive of these items.”
Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery
Quilt Study (Lone Star), 2025
Anne Buckwalter
Uffner & Liu
Eventually, Suss began exploring the other side of her family tree. She imagined spaces and objects linked to her mother’s relatives, Irish American on one side and Pennsylvania German on the other. Most of them had died before she was born. “My great-aunt, one of the remaining people in my mother’s family by the time I was alive, had a beautiful chest that was painted. It always seemed like this amazing magical item in her house,” she said. She also recalls childhood visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Barnes Foundation with her mother, a docent. She was drawn to the work of self-taught artists including Henri Rousseau, Horace Pippin, and the Pennsylvania Dutch. In one of her paintings currently on view, titled Living Room (2026), three Pennsylvania Dutch plates from the PMA’s collection are displayed over a bookshelf.
McEneaney has lived in Philadelphia since moving there for college in 1973. She paints with a similarly flattened perspective, shaped by Philadelphia museum collections and artists with regional ties. “I feel affinity with vernacular artists like Horace Pippin in terms of subject matter and flatness,” she said.
For Suss, however, painting domestic interiors pushes her beyond memory and into a space of desire and imagination. “There’s the idea of coveting things that I can never afford, which is always an element of my work,” she said. “The Pennsylvania Dutch have always been a part of that. There are things that I always just really, really loved.”
Samantha Joy Groff’s Mennonite influences
Samantha Joy Groff was raised in a Mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania. She paints moody, night-lit scenes of young women in satin negligees who commune with animals in the woods. Her models are often women she knows, and she sometimes depicts them wearing the traditional head coverings common to more conservative Pennsylvania Dutch communities.
Groff, who still lives and teaches in the region, says the culture was embedded in her childhood and her design sense. “I grew up going to quilt circles with my Grams and seeing the ornate textiles made by many women in the community; there is a great reverence for what’s called traditional folk arts like quilting, Fraktur, embroidery, and furniture making,” she said.
She no longer relies on overt references in her paintings, but she sees the culture in her process: “The staging, working with many women with similar upbringings, drawing, making studies, and then finally painting harkens to the hand-stitched 10-foot quilts my family made,” she said.
The patterns, too, carry meaning. “Interlocking circles for weddings, hex signs on barns for luck and prosperity. At first glance, it could be just a design, but like flowers in Victorian paintings, it holds more meaning,” she said. Stars symbolize good luck. Stylized birds, called distelfinks, symbolize happiness. Oaks and acorns bring strength. She’s also a fan of Buckwalter’s work, which makes her feel like she’s “sneaking around my Grams’s house.”
Women’s stories and an overlooked heritage
Buckwalter describes herself as a homebody who’s very sensitive to space. “I take a lot of pride and joy in making a space feel like home, and nesting, and tidying things,” she said. Part of her interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture is rooted in the idea of elevating the everyday: Women decorated mundane objects, like chairs and pitchers and bread boxes, with such intricate, frilly designs that they became, in Buckwalter’s words “almost holy.” “There’s something worshipful about domestic space that I really love and that I carry through my work.”
Her forthcoming museum show draws directly on that tradition. Working with the museum’s curator, she selected pieces from the Allentown collection, including show towels, embroidered samplers that Pennsylvania Dutch girls, usually 12 or 13 years old, made to prove their readiness for marriage. “It’s basically an embroidered sampler saying, ‘Look, I can sew, I’ll be a good wife,’” she explained.
Suss, meanwhile, sees her relationship to the home as part of a multigenerational tradition of housekeeping. Her 2017 solo show “Homemaker” at Jack Shainman included paintings of inherited needlepoints. “My real legacy is homemaking,” she said. “Yet we have five generations of homemakers, and nobody talks about it.” She hopes her paintings in some way elevate this devalued legacy. “Craft is in most cases devalued in comparison to art, because it has utility, which devalues something,” she said.
Groff, whose family settled in Pennsylvania in 1696, sees women as the keepers of that tradition. “Women are the great artists in the culture, and rather than just making homes, they are in charge of passing down over 200 years of traditional making that makes their craft so recognizable,” she said. Like Suss, she thinks the word “homemaking” undersells it. “I think ‘homemaking’ dampens the importance of the work. Reframing it as tradition, history, and generational knowledge honors the difficulty and hard work that’s embedded in each piece.”
Groff also pushes back on a romantic view of the work. “In our current cultural climate, homemaking is often seen as staying home and making bread as a kind of class fantasy, but in these spaces, my grandma and cousins still have to milk cows on the farm alongside the men,” she said. Like Buckwalter, she sees self-determination at the center of the culture. “I think they are turning ordinary spaces into places of beauty through their individual creative expression.” Groff has carried some of that making into new work, including the garments, from headdresses to props, she created for her show “Huntress.”
Artist Rebecca Morgan, who is best known for hyper-detailed, humorous paintings and ceramics about rural Appalachian life and stereotypes, has also embraced Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics as an emblem of local pride. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she often saw hex signs decorating local houses, barns, and sheds. “I always knew them as a ‘Pennsylvania Charm’ to give good luck, or to protect,” she said. “As a child, seeing a hex sign felt specific to my region of Pennsylvania. You didn’t see them in any other scenario other than the Pennsylvania radius, so it was a symbolic emblem of home.” A decade ago, the artist created a series of paintings with the motif. One work, a self-portrait she calls Pennsylvania Princess (year), features the artist wearing a mountain-laurel crown (Pennsylvania’s state flower) and a chest plate featuring a family hex sign that suggests a crest or superhero emblem. “I have always kept this unfinished painting with me because of its sincerity,” she said. A new body of her work is currently on view in “Painting in the Apocalypse” at Asya Geisberg.
Contemporary ambiguity meets Pennsylvania Dutch styles
While the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch, with its emphasis on family, faith, and homemaking, offers a traditional, even conservative framework for living, contemporary artists are using the style to create more nuanced, ambiguous spaces.
Groff, for her part, says the eroticism in her work runs counter to her upbringing. “When you grow up in a community like this, although known for its warm and friendly people, there is very little emotional excess,” she said. “‘Rural stoicism’ comes into play. But the emotional restraint I felt and continue to feel made everything bubbling inside of me that was messy want to seep out.”
The artist places her figures in remote settings, “away from the metaphorical community spaces where the emotional excess spills out through the figuration—a more psychological space, where danger lurks just outside the picture plane.” Her works have also been heavily influenced by her research into braucherei, a Pennsylvania Dutch religious folk healing practice. “I wanted to make paintings that evoke the divine in a way that may only make sense to a few,” she said. “Even the [Pennsylvania] Dutch tradition of hex signs on barns, which is debated as decorative or symbolic, informs how I make paintings that connect to a religious experience.” The scenes teeter between a kind of ecstatic spirituality and heightened sexuality, where no truth is discernibly clear.
Counter View, 2025
Sarah McEneaney
Taymour Grahne Projects
Still Life with Ankle Cuffs, 2026
Anne Buckwalter
New Discretions
Buckwalter acknowledges that Pennsylvania Dutch culture “very much amplifies heteronormative values” and explains that she was raised in a strict Christian household where there was a “moral panic” over sexuality and the possibility of premarital sex. She describes herself as a bisexual, queer woman who is “happily and intentionally childless.” But she says she maintains “a lot of affection and warmth for my upbringing, even the strict religious parts.” In her paintings, sexuality and kink live comfortably within these idyllic, old-fashioned worlds.
“I think one way that my work functions is as a way of reconciling or marrying these disparate parts of myself, and I’m kind of making the statement that all these things can live together even though they seem like they conflict with each other,” she said.
For Suss, tension and ambiguity function more subtly. The artist leaves figures out of her spaces entirely. The interiors lack any markers of a particular time. Such distortions enhance her storytelling. “I wanted to leave the paintings open to be the backdrop to your life or my life or whoever’s life,” she said. “When you depart from a memory, the departures from truth tell the story.”
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