Samuel Anderson Architects has completed a 65,000-square-foot addition to the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) complex located at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. 

The updated art museum experience includes a new entrance for the complex that is situated across from the John Custis House and Garden. The addition is the first major expansion that the museums have received since they were joined under the same roof back in 2007. Previously, visitors entered the complex through a circuitous underground route running through the former Public Hospital of 1773.

Inside the building, a new lobby and supplemental orientation spaces connect the two existing museums while a new cafe and museum store offer visitor amenities that are "significantly enlarged and bathed in natural light through expansive, new windows overlooking the picturesque Bicentennial Park," the architects write. 

The new wing brings a 25% increase in gallery space to the museums, while also allowing visitors to "see considerably more of these outstanding collections on view," the architects explain. The new galleries are designated to introduce visitors to the museums' expansive collections, which cover realms like folk art, currencies, archaeological artifacts, musical instruments, costumes, maps, prints, toys and dollhouse, tools and weapons, as well as changing exhibitions. 

The $41.7 million museum addition has been created as part of Colonial Williamsburg's recently completed $600 million capital campaign, an effort that includes the addition of a new state-of-the-art archaeology lab, a reconstructed "market house," and $163.5 million to update programming and research initiatives aimed at introducing new perspectives, including those of African Americans and Indigenous peoples, to the oral and performed histories of Colonial Williamsburg.