There's a new temporary exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis takes us on a tour through the world of one of America's first popular folk artists, Grandma Moses. It starts with an excerpt from a documentary screening in the exhibit featuring the artist herself.
"Come on, children, I want to show you the family album. You sit there, and I'll sit over here. That's right. Sit down. These are your ancestors."
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses, is one of America's first popular artists. Her landscape paintings captured the nation's imagination with their simplicity and nostalgic character. However, her story as a painter didn't start until the twilight years of her life.
A new temporary exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, organized in collaboration with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, explores what she calls a good day's work. Appropriately, the exhibit is titled "Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work."
She was no stranger to labor. Grandma Moses was in her 70s when she began painting, but stayed busy her entire life. Born in 1860, she passed away in 1961 at age 101. She spent most of her life on a farm in upstate New York, doing household tasks while running businesses that sold butter and potato chips. When arthritis made sewing too difficult, she took up a brush in her spare time. The exhibit contains some of her preserved sewn works and emphasizes that transition.
Another thing the exhibit quickly points out is Moses' alienation from the art world, at the time. She was disliked by the art establishment for her lack of formal training and technique, qualities assistant curator of modern art Josie Johnson says are exactly what drew the public into her works.
"This is someone who was extremely popular in her day, but very much not universally liked," Johnson says. "There were a lot of detractors in the elite art world, especially, who did not appreciate her work for what it was. She was at the center of some even diplomatic relations. The U.S. State Department sent her paintings around to other countries during the Cold War. I mean, so it really gets to some big, heavy issues within the world, beyond the art world to this point."
The first part of the exhibit is subtitled "Eye of the Storm." Moses painted many calm landscapes, but she never shied away from catastrophe. Blizzards, thunderstorms and wildfires all made their way onto her canvases, and she found herself in the midst of an artistic maelstrom in the middle of the 20th century.
"So 'Eye of the Storm' is quite meaningful in many ways, and we really wanted to just start the show acknowledging that this is someone who's had a lot of ink spilled already, a lot of different opinions," Johnson says. "And we want to bring that up at the front and then kind of let that thread continue throughout. Let some of those questions remain in your mind."
Crystal Bridges is the only Southern venue on "A Good Day's Work's" tour, and curators say they wanted to emphasize Moses' Southern connections. She lived in two places throughout her life. She spent most of her life in New York, but she also lived for nearly 18 years in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
"The Southern part hasn't been acknowledged as much in the past, even though, as the show illustrates, she's painting it a lot," Johnson says. "It shows up in a lot of her work, and a lot of those works are here. They're showing the Shenandoah Valley. They're showing it in a really tender way, because this was a really special place to her. This is where she had some really important years of her life, raising her children, starting businesses, working on the farm. And we wanted to show, too, how this is kind of a great example of how she's looking back on these memories."
She often painted her dwellings and her neighbors' houses while omitting certain personal details. One painting contains a glaring example. A photograph hangs beside it, depicting the real-life inspiration.
"This is the Dudley Farm, so you can read more about it on there," Johnson says. "The house that she lived in, there's a photograph of it right here. She's there with her family. She paints the building right into this painting, including little details like the rocking horse, architectural details. So she's in this case really showing exactly what is in the photograph in the painting.
"Looking back on her time in the South, on the other hand, the figures are completely different. She doesn't include the people that are in the foreground, her family. Also, the three Black figures that were living and working with her family for years while she was down there. They're omitted from the scene."
These paintings were often done from Moses' memory. She was born in 1860 and lived in the South after Reconstruction. Curators note that her depiction, or lack thereof, of people of color is a point of conversation throughout the exhibit.
"A Good Day's Work" was also influenced by someone who witnessed Moses' conflict with the art world firsthand and helped to navigate her legacy in the following decades. Jane Kallir is Otto Kallir's granddaughter. Jane ran her grandfather's gallery, Galerie St. Etienne, for roughly 40 years after his passing, and now oversees the Kallir Research Institute and seeded the Smithsonian's Moses collection with 15 paintings, which is why this show exists.
Otto, her grandfather, was the first gallery owner to show Moses' work, even though everyone else wrote her off as too old. The elder Kallir was Jewish and escaped to America when the Nazis invaded his Austrian homeland. The younger Kallir says her grandfather was excited and fascinated by the United States, though he found much of the elite art dry.
"He was looking for American art, and when he went around in New York City, all the galleries at that time were in Midtown on 57th Street," Kallir says. "He looked at all of this art, and he was like, you know, 'I've seen this stuff like 20 years ago in Europe. It's really boring. Been there, done that. That is not what this country is all about. That's not what I see as being American.' And so he was interested in anything that was unique and special to this country."
Moses struck him as such. This was during the waning years of the Great Depression and before World War II, so America was struggling with an identity crisis. President Franklin Roosevelt was keen on cultivating an American identity. Kallir says that the Roosevelt administration helped usher in a wave of self-taught painters at various galleries in New York and even at the Museum of Modern Art.
"So there was a precedent for Grandma Moses," she says. "The problem was that in 1939, Grandma Moses was 79 years old, and so she had been included in that year in a small group show at the Museum of Modern Art. But when the collector who had discovered her, a guy named Louis Caldor, tried to get dealers interested in her, they all said, '79 years old, you know, am I going to waste my time and money promoting this artist and she's just going to die?' Right?
"And so it was only when he came to Otto Kallir, my grandfather, and his newly established gallery, saying again, that my grandfather said, 'You know, I don't care how old she is. This work looks really, really interesting.' And he gave her a one-woman show that opened in October 1940. And he called it simply 'What a Farm Wife Painted: Paintings by Anna Mary Robertson Moses.'"
She hadn't become the nation's grandma yet, except to her own family and local community.
"The show, the paintings were priced at like $10, $20. They didn't sell very many of them, but it was a popular success and it was a critical success," Kallir says. "And after the show closed at the gallery, St. Etienne, Gimbels, which was then like one of the major department stores in New York, invited her to contribute to a Thanksgiving festival at the store. And they invited her to come down to New York and to address the press and the public.
"And that was the moment, sort of literally and figuratively, when Grandma Moses became Grandma Moses, because the journalists discovered the name, put it in the press. And, you know, as they say, the rest is history. Except it didn't happen immediately. There was sort of buildup to her becoming first a national and then even an international celebrity."
After the Second World War, Grandma Moses rose in popularity alongside another popular artist, Norman Rockwell. In fact, the only painting in the exhibit not by Moses is Rockwell's "Christmas Homecoming," which features the Rockwell family and Grandma Moses. Here's assistant curator of modern American art, Seynabou Diallo.
"Moses is really our first example of an artist turning into a media sensation, obviously not happening overnight, but becoming a very important American figure," Diallo says. "Along with that is Norman Rockwell, who was also alienated from the high art community in New York. He is also an artist to the people, and they both very much related on that and came to have a very fortuitous relationship with each other, celebrating multiple birthdays with each other.
"Here we see that he's with her for her 88th birthday. Also celebrating her 100th birthday with her. And in this painting, what makes it so significant is it's the only painting where he paints his family members all together in one scene. And he decided to add Grandma Moses, which really just relays how closely of a relationship they have."
Navigating through "A Good Day's Work," you'll see Moses experiments with glitter, recognition of her work with Hallmark, with an opportunity to mail your own postcard, plus Jerome Hill's Academy Award-nominated documentary featuring Grandma Moses on her farm. And finally, you'll arrive at the final section, which contains her final painting, "Rainbow."
Jane Kallir says that while she was the nation's grandmother, she felt a personal connection to Moses, and the finale hits all of the high notes.
"I think that what you see in that section, you see some of her very earliest paintings, like 'Hoosick Valley Through the Window,' which is a very quiet painting, but really shows her skills as a landscape painter," Kallir says. "Then you see a painting like 'Joy Ride,' which kind of represents the epitome of the Grandma Moses style. You know, the kind of just the joyfulness that made her such a holiday favorite. And, you know, the celebration of the winter holidays.
"And then you have her last painting, her last finished painting, 'Rainbow,' which shows her just, you know, positivity and hopefulness for the future. You know, regardless of all the horrible things that we all know and that she knew were happening every day."
You can visit Grandma Moses' work now through March 29, 2027, at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville. Tickets are $15 and get you into both "A Good Day's Work" and "Keith Haring in 3D." However, admission is free for everyone 25 and under, SNAP benefit recipients, veterans, active duty military and their families. You can visit crystalbridges.org for more.
And one more time, "Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work" is running now through March 29. Tickets are $15, though members, SNAP participants, veterans and youth 25 and under are admitted for free. SNAP participants can call 479-657-2335 to enroll for free entry to temporary exhibitions.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
