Reinventing Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses Profile
American Folk painter Grandma Moses (1860-1961) was born Anna Mary Robertson Moses in Washington County, New York (d. 1961). Moses who was internationally popular for her naïve documentation of rural life in the United States spent most of her life as a farmer's wife.
Anna Robertson had only sporadic periods of schooling during her childhood. At age 12 she left her parents' farm and worked as a hired girl until she married. In her late 70s, even without formal art training and largely self-educated, she began to paint for her own pleasure rural scenes that documented rural life in the United States in the early 19th and early 20th centuries.
Her work was exhibited in a drugstore window attracting the attention of the New York art collector Louis Calder. Thus, is born a new art, the naïve art and a new artist. In 1939 three of her landscapes were displayed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940 the Galerie St Étienne in New York presented her first solo show; this launched her career as an artist. Her work is characterized by harmonious arrangement of figures and simple, decorative treatment, as in Thanksgiving Turkey , a painting she did in 1943, which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).( “Moses, Grandma," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007 & http://uk.encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation.}