The Bennington Museum presents Grandma Moses and the “Primitive” Tradition, an exhibition on view June 1 through October 30.
The Bennington Museum is home to the largest public collection of paintings by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961). Better known as Grandma Moses, the artist was catapulted to international fame during the 1940s as the result of her charming, naïvely executed, paintings of rural American farm life. To commemorate the 150th year of Grandma Moses’ birth, the Bennington Museum presents Grandma Moses and the ‘Primitive’ Tradition. This exhibition, the largest of Moses’ work organized by the museum in over a decade, is to be installed in three of the museum’s eleven galleries. This temporary exhibition is in addition to the permanent Grandma Moses Exhibit housed in the Grandma Moses Gallery.
As the best known ‘primitive’ artist of the twentieth-century, Grandma Moses and her work are often seen as exceptional, outside the mainstream of American art history. This exhibition provides a context in which to better understand Moses’ work, by examining the history of ‘primitive’ painting in America, from the self-taught and amateur painters of the nineteenth century to the modern ‘primitives’ who came to fame around the same time as Moses.
Grandma Moses and the ‘Primitive’ Tradition features 55 works (20 by Moses and 35 by other artists who painted in the ‘primitive’ tradition). These works are drawn from the Bennington Museum’s world-renowned Grandma Moses Collection, and augmented by strategic loans from other institutions, such as the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City, and private collections.
www.benningtonmuseum.org