Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) in Williamsburg, Virginia, is the United States' first and the world's oldest continually operated museum dedicated to the preservation, collection, and exhibition of American folk art. Located just outside the historic boundary of Colonial Williamsburg, the museum was founded in 1957 through a collection donated by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and an endowment from her widower, John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to the Standard Oil fortune and co-founder of Colonial Williamsburg. With her seminal collection, Abby Rockefeller elevated a body of material that had long been dismissed as homespun craft to a nationally-recognized and highly-regarded form of American art. The museum is now co-located with the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, together known as the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller began collecting American folk art in the late 1920s under the advisement of consultants and art dealers. In 1932, she anonymously loaned part of her collection to the Museum of Modern Art exhibition American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900, which ran from November 30, 1932, through January 14, 1933, in New York and later toured six US cities. In 1935, she loaned part of her collection to the Ludwell-Paradise House in Williamsburg, and four years later donated the collection to Colonial Williamsburg, where it remained until 1956. After Abby's death in 1948, John D. Rockefeller Jr. announced he would endow a Williamsburg museum bearing the Rockefeller name. Their son David Rockefeller augmented the collection in 1956 with another 54 folk art objects his mother had donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection opened in May 1957, with Mitchell Wilder as Director. The facility changed names in 1977 to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center and again in 2000 to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. The original building was expanded in 1992, moved and expanded again in 2007, and a further $40 million expansion was announced in 2014, with a new 65,000-square-foot wing projected to open in 2019 featuring a new street-level entrance on Nassau Street.

The museum's collection originated with 424 objects collected by Abby Rockefeller between 1929 and 1942, which remain the core of holdings that now exceed 7,000 folk art pieces dating from the 1720s to the present. In the first year after opening, the museum added works assembled by J. Stuart Halladay and Herrell Thomas, Holger Cahill, Edith Gregor Halpert, and John Law Robertson. The collection encompasses paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, and decorative objects from the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular strengths in portraiture, Southern and African American folk art, sculpture, fraktur, and textiles. The museum's holdings include representative works by well-known artists such as Eddie Arning, Wilhelm Schimmel, Erastus Salisbury Field, Edward Hicks, Lewis Miller, Albert Hoffman, Louis Joseph Bahin, and Ammi Phillips. Various exhibitions have featured 18th and 19th-century painters including Zedekiah Belknapp, James Sanforth Elsworth, and Asabel Lynde Powers. The collection also includes notable 18th-century watercolor paintings such as The Old Plantation by South Carolina slave owner John Rose.

Among the museum's signature works are several significant paintings that illustrate the breadth of American folk art. Edward Hicks's Leedom Farm (1849) represents late work by the Pennsylvania painter renowned for his Peaceable Kingdom compositions, depicting the farm of David Leedom in Bucks County shortly before Hicks's death. Joseph Hidley's View of Poestenkill, New York, is one of at least five views of his hometown documenting 19th-century growth; Hidley worked as a house and sign painter and taxidermist. Charles Hamilton's Market of Charleston, South Carolina, depicts the 1841 market hall and the city's economic life after the Civil War; Hamilton, originally a woodcarver and advertising figure designer, was active from 1832 to after 1870. The portrait collection includes William Dering's Portrait of George Booth, painted during Dering's activity as painter and dance instructor in Williamsburg in the 1740s, showing a planter's son in a pose with symbols of status and masculinity. The Gansevoort Limner's Portrait of Deborah Glen (1739) is a wedding portrait of a wealthy New Yorker's daughter in costly dress. The Beardsley Limner (attributed) painted Portrait of Harmony Child Wight, a Massachusetts woman with fashionable attributes from around 1790. The portraits of John and Ruth Stanley Mix, of uncertain attribution to possibly Abraham Delanoy or Reuben Moulthrop, display distinctive technical variations in faces, hands, and clothing. Joseph H. Davis's Tilton Family is one of approximately 135 known watercolor portraits by the itinerant painter, notable for its decorative floor treatment with abstract patterns. The collection also includes the embroidery St. Joseph's Academy, Emmitsburg, Maryland (circa 1810-1820), combining embroidery with watercolor on silk, acquired by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in 1935.

The museum's physical history reflects its institutional growth. The collection was first housed in the Ludwell-Paradise House in Williamsburg, the original real estate purchase by John D. Rockefeller to create Colonial Williamsburg, which became a private residence after 1957. The purpose-built original museum opened in May 1957 as a two-story Georgian/Federal Revival brick building with a prominent oval garden, located just outside the historic district of Colonial Williamsburg at South England Street, adjacent to the Williamsburg Inn. Nina Fletcher Little, a pioneer collector in American decorative arts and folk art, advised on the design, suggesting lowered ceilings and domestic-scaled spaces; she also conducted the first research on the collection, made attributions, and wrote the first catalogue. In 1992, architects Roche-Dinkeloo designed a 19,000-square-foot single-story brick addition featuring a planted wood and brick pergola and an adjoining fountain garden. In 2007, AARFAM relocated to co-locate with the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum on Francis Street between Nassau and South Henry Streets, near Merchants Square. The new location provided 10,400 square feet of exhibition space across 11 galleries, entered via a circuitous arrival sequence beneath Colonial Williamsburg's adjacent Public Hospital of 1773 building. With this relocation, the original building and 1992 addition became associated with the Spa of Colonial Williamsburg. The 2014-2019 expansion added a new 65,000-square-foot wing with a more accessible street-level entrance on Nassau Street.

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum is located in Williamsburg, Virginia, and operates as part of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. It is co-located with the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum on Francis Street between Nassau and South Henry Streets, near Merchants Square, under the combined designation of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. The museum's website is http://history.org/history/museums/abby_art.cfm. The 2019 expansion provided improved accessibility with a new street-level entrance on Nassau Street, replacing the previous circuitous arrival sequence. As one of two named collections within the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, the museum retains its distinct identity while sharing facilities and administrative infrastructure with its decorative arts counterpart.