American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

At MoMA Exhibitions, *American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller* returns to a foundational chapter in New York’s museum history. Rockefeller’s early collecting helped legitimize vernacular American objects—quilts, carvings, paintings—inside institutions that once dismissed them as craft or curiosity. The exhibition traces how ideas of “American” taste were built through selection, display, and donation, not discovered fully formed. One takeaway lingers: folk art’s authority here depends as much on the museum frame as on the makers’ hands.