Seattle Art Museum is organized like a world map, scrambled but fixed. It’s not actually laid out like a globe, but continents are in discrete rooms… with a few exceptions. Africa is a short walk from Europe, but Native America is separate from America. Separate, but adjacent. Modern and contemporary art from all over the world is grouped together, as if continents themselves were a pre-1950s idea.

As if all that weren’t complicated enough, then come the objects that don’t fit in any one place, like the silk-on-wool sampler that Charlotte Turner handstitched in a European missionary school in Sierra Leone when she was 10 years old and had become a "Liberated African." In this week's paper, I tried to track down as much as possible about what Charlotte Turner's life might have been like in "Unraveling a Mystery in Storage at the Seattle Art Museum."

Here’s a little of what I found: Charlotte Turner’s sampler was donated to SAM as part of an American collection, but has no known link to this continent. Instead, she came from present-day Nigeria, most likely, and made this piece in a missionary school in Sierra Leone. Her British teacher would have given her the design to copy, and a British buyer would have commissioned the sampler in the first place, donating money to the missionary cause—and earning the right to name “Charlotte Turner,” whose real name is lost.

But one seemingly simple question is unanswered: Does her sampler belong in the European gallery or the African?

Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM's curator of European paintings and sculptures, said she doesn't know whether she'd put the sampler in a European or an African gallery if she had to choose. African curator Pamela McClusky said she'd choose African.

Their lack of agreement is probably moot in the practical sense, because they’ll probably always show the sampler in a themed exhibition separate from the geographical layout of the collections. Its first appearance is in a special exhibition of world textiles, set to happen in 2016. (This thing is so interesting that if it weren’t made of delicate cloth, it would be prominently displayed all the time.)

But as a thought exercise, consider a gallery where this sampler would really belong, a gallery full of objects that are dislocated in space, that hover between places, that only really belong in transit. What might such a funny little room be called? I looked for a spatial equivalent to anachronism, a word that might mean out of place rather than out of time. I found a couple possible words, of which I'm choosing, a little arbitrarily, anachorism. (Some prefer anatopism, but it seems slightly more etymologically sketchy.)

In the Anachorism Gallery at SAM, first you'd find porcelain exports, said Julie Emerson, the recently retired curator in whose name Charlotte Turner's sampler was donated.

Dutch- and English-style porcelain made in 18th-century China to satisfy a hungry market abroad is both Chinese and European. There's no orthodoxy for categorizing it: At some museums, it's held in the Chinese department, and in others, the European. At SAM, it's classified as Chinese but displayed both in the Asian galleries and in SAM's thoroughly mongrel Porcelain Room, which is embedded in the European wing.

Wandering through the Porcelain room online this morning, through this illustrated PDF, I found a picturesque painting of the English sport of foxhunting—decorating a bowl made in China for the European market. I found an elaborately painted floral-and-tobacco-leaf-patterned soup tureen made in China. In China, where nobody ate soup out of a tureen, an 18th-century French form.

I found a square bottle manufactured in Japanese porcelain in Japan "in the shape of a Dutch gin bottle, then painted in Holland using a Japanese decorative style derived from Chinese Ming and Qing examples, which ironically, had probably taken their inspiration from European enamel painting on glass."

I also realized that one of my favorite sets in the Porcelain Room is an example of Chinese exports for European taste: the "Mystery Urn" set (I wrote a little about it here). It's a series of plates, a tureen, and a stand made in China, bearing a design that contains secret profiles of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the Dauphin and Madame Royale. This was around 1795, in the midst of the French Revolution, and the collectors of this set were loyalists in hiding. The porcelain was commissioned as a memorial to the executed family.

One more example from Ishikawa: In the African galleries at SAM sit two salt containers, each standing a full foot tall and made of ivory. They were carved by Africans to be sent away and displayed on Renaissance tables in 16th-century Europe. One features figures with African features alongside patterns from Portuguese Renaissance architecture. Speaking of architectural displacement, the missionary school where Charlotte Turner studied most likely resembled a Southern plantation with a big porch, McClusky said, probably built by freed American slaves—like this one that still stands in Freetown.