The label is already a misunderstanding: 'Pennsylvania Dutch' comes from 'Pennsylvania Deutsch', the German-speaking immigrants who settled the region from the 17th to 19th centuries. Their decorated world — painted furniture, embroidered samplers, barn-side hex signs and the illuminated Fraktur manuscripts — centred on Lancaster County, and it is now being reclaimed by a generation of women painters who find the old vocabulary useful for saying new things.

The most widely seen of them is Anne Buckwalter, whose 2026 canvas 'Angels' leads Artsy's survey of the movement. Buckwalter fills tidy, patterned interiors with the flat, decorative motifs of the folk tradition — tableware, wallpaper, bedding all patterned — then slips in erotic undercurrents: sex toys, pornography, glimpses of bodies through windows and screens. Her 2023 solo 'Reins on a Rocking Horse' at Rachel Uffner Gallery established the formula of the respectable domestic scene quietly coming apart at the seams.

She is not working alone. Becky Suss, Rebecca Morgan and Sarah McEneaney each draw on the region's formal language, while emerging painter Samantha Joy Groff takes the most documentary approach of the group, portraying contemporary Pennsylvania Dutch women in darkened, rural tableaux. What ties them together, beyond geography, is subject matter: domesticity, sexuality, women's labour, and the uneasy mix of cultural pride and embarrassment that comes with an agrarian heritage.

The article's argument is that a craft tradition long treated as quaint heritage has real critical bite left in it. Used against itself, the language of the sampler and the hex sign turns out to be well suited to questions about who does the housework, who gets to be erotic, and whose history counts — questions the original makers of the folk art, for the most part, were never asked.