Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum
| Established | 1957 |
|---|---|
| Location | Williamsburg, Virginia |
| Coordinates | 37°09′16″N 76°24′57″W / 37.1545°N 76.4159°W |
| Website | AARFAM |
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) 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, Virginia, AARFAM was founded with 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 original building opened in May of 1957 and was expanded in 1992 before being moved and expanded again in 2007, each time to accommodate its growing collection. Abby Rockafeller's collection of 424 pieces became the basis of a collection that now includes more than 7,000 folk art pieces dating from the 1720s to the present. A further expansion at its current location is projected to open in 2019.
Having opened originally as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection (AARFAC), the facility changed names in 1977 to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (AARFAC) and again in 2000 to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. Now co-located with the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, both collections retain their respective names — and are together known as the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg.
After collecting a formative group of American folk art pieces under the advisement of consultants and art dealers, art patron Abby Aldrich Rockefeller anonymously loaned part of her folk art 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. The exhibition would later tour six US cities, and in 2017, Antiques Magazine wrote that "whether or not there was unanimous agreement on the importance of folk art in that story, the category could no longer be ignored."
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