As much as New Yorkers like to think of their city as insulated from the national culture, none of its institutions are exempt from the saltine pomp of America’s 250^th birthday. Even MoMA is showing patriotism, dropping its globalist sheen with a small exhibition of early American folk art collected by its co-founder, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. The show offers a window into the museum’s early days, when American artists like Charles Sheeler and Elie Nadelman’s fascinations with vernacular craft inspired a run of programming for art variously described as “naïve,” “primitive,” and “self-taught.” With Rockefeller’s backing, curators Alfred Barr and Holger Cahill influentially positioned folk art as a national artistic heritage unbeholden to European telos, one alive to modernist concerns. Barr called such work a “tributary of one of the main streams of modern taste,” flowing from the lesson of Henri Rousseau.

The show is a panoply of weathervanes, calligraphed birth certificates, and ungainly paintings, including several by roving colonial portraitists known as “limners.” Although Rockefeller left part of this collection to MoMA, the museum later deaccessioned the gift, which then moved to a dedicated museum in Colonial Williamsburg. Returned to MoMA, Rockefeller’s artifacts retain their alien charm; they are well complemented by the modernists who so admired them. Somewhere in-between are works by “self-taught” artists from the period, such as William Edmonson, John Kane, and Morris Hirshfield, whom Barr exhibited until he got ousted for including them. For semiquincentennial celebration, this is as good as it gets. —Nick Irvin