Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work
Grandma Moses, We Are Resting, 1951, oil on high-density fiberboard, overall: 24 × 30 in. (61 × 76.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Kallir Family, in Memory of Hildegard Bachert, 2019.55
Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work sheds new light on a beloved body of work by Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860 – 1961). Grandma Moses used creativity, hope, and togetherness as tools for shaping a life that she metaphorically likened to “a good day’s work.” Moses melded direct observation of nature and personal memories in her works, resulting in idiosyncratic, yet compelling, stories of America. The artist’s fame made her a polarizing figure — beloved by the popular press and American public but belittled by the art world and critical press. This exhibition introduces the artist to new generations and examines her legacy in the context of America today.
Description
Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work explores how an unlikely artist—marginalized at the time for being elderly, female, and untrained—catapulted into the American imagination in the 1940s and '50s. The exhibition charts Moses’s life story and creative development, from her earliest artistic efforts to the emergence of her signature style. Drawing on Moses’s own metaphor of her life as “a good day’s work,” the project foregrounds the premise that Moses was creative in her farm labor and workmanlike in her creative practice. It explores Moses as a multidimensional artist who leaned into industry and imagination in equal measure. She melded direct observation of nature and personal memories in her works, resulting in idiosyncratic, yet compelling, stories of America. The exhibition will shed new light on a beloved body of work and considers the sociocultural forces that Moses would variously reflect on or obscure in her paintings, and positions her as a central figure in the history of twentieth-century American art.
Moses experienced tremendous change in her century-long lifetime, which spanned the American Civil War, two world wars, and the civil rights era. She was eighty years old in 1940, when Otto Kallir—an art dealer and recent immigrant who had fled the Nazi regime in his native Austria—introduced her to the American public. “Grandma Moses,” as she was dubbed by the press, quickly became a media sensation, achieving a celebrity status that raised questions in her time and remains intriguing today.
Detractors demeaned Moses’s lack of formal training and her story-time scenes—widely popularized through Kallir’s management and Hallmark’s transformation of her images into greeting cards in 1947. But Moses brought an indomitable spirit to her artmaking, conveying a candor and authority that resonated with the modernist quest for a homespun American visual tradition.
The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art, and Randall R. Griffey, head curator, with support from Maria R. Eipert, curatorial assistant. A richly illustrated catalogue, published in partnership with Princeton University Press, will accompany the exhibition.