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 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.

There, the collection occupied an expansion of 10,400 square feet of exhibition space with 11 galleries, entered via a notably circuitous arrival sequence beneath Colonial Williamsburg's adjacent Public Hospital of 1773 building.

[11] The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation announced in 2014 a $40 million addition[2] to the Dewitt Wallace/Abby Aldrich structure to break ground in April 2017 and open in 2019 — to include a new 65,000sf wing and to feature a new more accessible, street-level entrance on Nassau Street.

[4] The first year after its opening the museum came to include, besides Rockefeller's collection, works assembled by J. Stuart Halladay and Herrell Thomas, Holger Cahill, Edith Gregor Halpert, and John Law Robertson.

It includes representative works of well renowned artists, such as Eddie Arning, Wilhelm Schimmel, Erastus Salisbury Field, Edward Hicks, Lewis Miller, Albert Hoffman, Louis Joseph Bahin and Ammi Phillips.