Grandma Moses: American Modern

Grandma Moses: American Modern is a long-overdue exhibition reexamining the beloved American artist Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses and reestablishing her to her rightful place within the canon of mid-century American Modern Art.  The exhibition counters Moses’s marginalization as strictly a “folk” artist and a phenomenon within popular culture through the presentation of fresh research and in-depth analyses of Moses’s celebrated artworks and unique painting techniques to address the myth of the self-taught artist through a modernist lens. Grandma Moses: American Modern also contextualizes Moses within the modern art era by pairing her paintings and ephemera alongside fellow “folk artists” as well as her modernist contemporaries such as Joseph Cornell, Helen Frankenthaler, Joseph Pickett, and Andy Warhol.   Together with the works in the permanent gallery dedicated to the life and work of Grandma Moses, the Museum will have on view over 65 works by this great American modern folk artist.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Grandma Moses: American Modern is a long-overdue reexamination of beloved American artist Grandma Moses, restoring her rightful place within the canon of mid-century American Art. One of the best-known artists of her time, and a true American legend, Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961) was often marginalized as a latter-day "folk" painter or a phenomenon of popular media. Accompanying a traveling exhibition, this new book looks closely at the paintings themselves and the artist’s compelling biography to reassert her role in the development of a culture of modernist art at mid-century. Presenting fresh research, several scholars examine Moses’s name, public persona, painted world, and wildly popular place in American pop culture; address the myth of the self-taught artist; and contextualize her work alongside such contemporaries as Horace Pippin, Elie Nadelman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Morris Hirshfield.

Grandma Moses: American Modern