Colonial Williamsburg Museum - 2014 Summer Issue WILLIAMSBURG

contains twenty-six exhibition galleries, as
well as a state-of-the-art auditorium, the
popular Colonial Williamsburg Museum
Store, and the casual Museum Café.
Creation of the complex was made possible
by a generous gift from DeWitt and Lila
Acheson Wallace, founders of Reader’s
Digest.
The DeWitt Wallace Museum hosts a
broad array of regularly changing exhibitions
that feature furniture, silver, ceramics and
glass, paintings, prints and maps, tools and
weapons, numismatics, musical instruments,
textiles and much more. The collection has
many strengths, including the world’s largest
body of early Southern furniture, nationally
important assemblages of English silver and
pewter, a vast array of 18th-century clothing
and textiles, and one of the most complete
bodies of British ceramics outside England.
Award-winning installations of these and
other materials provide abundant context
for the rich menu of historical, political
and cultural programs offered daily in the
contiguous Historic Area.
Now located under the same roof as the
DeWitt Wallace Museum, The Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Folk Art Museum was our
nation’s first institution dedicated solely to
the preservation and exhibition of American
folk art. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. established
the Folk Art Museum in 1957 in memory
of his wife,
Abby, and her
leading role in the
appreciation and
study of American
folk art. Mrs.
Rockefeller gave
the core collection
of 424 objects
to the Colonial
Williamsburg
Foundation in Folk Art Quilt
1939. Today the
collection of more than 5,000 pieces of
American folk art includes works dating from
the 1720s to the present.
The Folk Art Museum moved from its
original location to enlarged quarters adjacent
to the DeWitt Wallace Museum in 2007.
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate exhibition at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum
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