This article looks at the Homelands Exhibition in Rochester, New York which took place in the spring of 1920. Placing the craft objects on display, as well as their makers and their creative labor, into a larger constellation of local and national history, I focus on how the material culture of the show acted simultaneously as a stand-in and an extensions of their makers, to trouble the boundaries between author and reader, art and work, producer and spectator, the quotidian and the exceptional, and ultimately to question what it meant to be American at this particular moment in time.