A long-term exhibition featuring more than 30 folk portraits will open Saturday at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.
In celebration of its 60th anniversary, the art museum will present the exhibition “We the People: American Folk Portraits,” according to a press release from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The exhibit features portraits the museum has recently acquired, as well as constant favorites. Artists produced these featured portraits between the late 18th and early 19th centuries and ordinary citizens commissioned them in the era before photographs.
Known as folk portraiture, this genre of painting falls outside of academic institutions and were created by artists of varying backgrounds and training. As a result, these portraits are appreciated for their unique characterizations and are among the art museum’s most popular, according to the release.
“Colonial Williamsburg is blessed with one of the nation’s finest and most geographically diverse collections of American folk portraits,” said Ronald L. Hurst, the institution’s Carlisle H. Humelsine Chief Curator and Vice President for Collections, Conservation, and Museums.
“With their deeply human qualities, they are in many ways the heart of the Foundation’s folk art collection. It is highly fitting that they be featured in this special anniversary year,” Hurst said.
“We the People” is more than a collection of portraits, however. The exhibition will also confront misconceptions about American folk portraiture- including whether the subjects are smiling, whether they are wearing their real clothing or a costume and whether their heads were painted onto bodies previously painted.
Research about both the subjects and the painters will be included with the exhibition so viewers will have the context to understand who these people were.
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum is the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States whose purpose is to collect, preserve and display American folk art.
