Pieces from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, will travel to New York City in January in a special loan exhibition at the Winter Antiques Show at Park Avenue Armory.
Announced Monday by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, “Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum: Revolution and Evolution” features some of the finest pieces from the museum’s more than 7,000 item collection–a collection built around 420 objects given to the foundation in 1939 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, according to a Colonial Williamsburg press release.
The loan exhibition, celebrating Mrs. Rockefeller’s legacy, kicks off the museum’s 60th anniversary year.
“It is fitting that the nation’s finest collection of American folk art will celebrate its 60th anniversary at the critically acclaimed Winter Antiques Show in the city where Mrs. Rockefeller’s remarkable philanthropy remains in evidence today,” Ronald Hurst, the foundation’s vice president for collections, conservation and museums, said in the release.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, an ardent collector of art and wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped start New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Among the pieces in the loan exhibition is “Baby in Red Chair,” an oil painting Mrs. Rockefeller acquired in 1931, the first year she began collecting folk art, according to the release. The painting appeared in a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man, 1740-1900.”
Now in its 63rd year, the Winter Antiques Show is a nationally known art, antiques and design fair.
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is the only cultural institution invited to present the show’s loan exhibition twice in the past 25 years, the release said.
