DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum
About DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum
The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum (DWDAM), is a museum dedicated to British and American fine and decorative arts from 1670-1840, located in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Situated just outside the historic boundary of Colonial Williamsburg, DWDAM was founded with an initial 1982 donation by DeWitt Wallace (1889–1981) and his wife Lila Bell Acheson Wallace (1889–1984) — co-founders of Reader's Digest.
The Wallaces donated $12 million to finance reconstruction of the nation's first public mental hospital – the 1773 Public Hospital – and construction of the decorative arts museum — to be connected to the hospital by an underground concourse. Having initially opened in 1985, the museum has since expanded to include the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and will undergo another expansion to open in 2019 with a new, street-level entrance.
The museum features diverse collections related to the founding of the United States — including furniture, paintings, silver, numismatics, ceramics, tools, textiles, glass, maps, weapons, media and other objects from the permanent Colonial Williamsburg collection.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Founded
- 1985
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Nearby museums
Make a day of it. 4 more museums are within a mile of DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum; the closest, Colonial Williamsburg, is about a mile away.
