In the curatorial world, this is the million-dollar question—is it fine art or folk art? We’ll explore what defines these two genres of American art and discuss how museums decide what constitutes each, how that impacts what organizations collect, and how they interpret this body of material. Using Colonial Williamsburg’s vast and deep collections of American decorative and fine arts and American folk art, we’ll compare and contrast various forms with a particular emphasis on portraiture.

Laura Pass Barry is the Juli Grainger Curator of paintings, drawings and sculpture at Colonial Williamsburg where she oversees the research, documentation, interpretation, and exhibition of fine, folk, and decorative arts paintings and sculpture at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, historic area exhibit buildings, and the Rockefeller’s Bassett Hall. She holds degrees in Art History and American Studies from the College of Wooster and the College of William and Mary. She has organized numerous exhibitions at the Foundation, most recently including Pierre Eugene du Simitiere: Artist, Naturalist, Collector (2022), The Art of Edward Hicks (2020), Artists on the Move: Portraits for a New Nation (2018), We the People: American Folk Portraits (2017), and America’s Folk Art (2017). She is also a contributing author to numerous articles as well as Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon (1997), winner of the 1998 Independent Publisher Book Award; and The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks (1999); editor of Revolution & Evolution: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (2017); and co-editor of a forthcoming book highlighting the American folk art collections at Colonial Williamsburg.