“Grandma Moses” comes to DAI

Famous folk artist is featured in new exhibit


How to Go:

What: “American Sampler: Grandma Moses and the Handicraft Tradition.” A companion focus exhibition, “Visions and Dreams: Threaded Works by Mary Borkowski,” showcases handiwork by Mary Borkowksi who spent much of her life in Dayton.

When: Through February 21, 2016

Admission: $14 adults; $11 seniors (60+), students (18+ w/ID), active military and groups (10 or more); $6 youth (ages 7-17); and free for members and children (ages 6 & under). Prices include admission to the special exhibition and the museum’s permanent collection. Tickets may be purchased at the museum’s Guest Services Desk, by phone at 937-223-4ART (4278), or online at www.daytonartinstitute.org.

Docent-led tours of the special exhibition are available for individuals, groups and schools. Contact The DAI's Events & Group Sales Coordinator, at (937) 512-0152 or dyoung@daytonart.org, for more information or to book a tour.

Related programs

  • A Super Saturday Family Day on November 28
  • The Fifth Third Bank Arts Night Out presentation of the stage play "Grandma Moses: An American Primitive," December 3–6
  • The lecture "Grandma Moses: Life and Art" by Jane Kallir, Director of Galerie St. Etienne, on December 10
  • A Curatorial Conversations gallery talk about the Janet Fish painting, Embroidery from Uzbekistan (2008) on December 17
  • The workshop "Draw from the Collection: Rockwell Kent and Grandma Moses" on January 23

For more about the exhibition and related programs, visit www.daytonartinstitute.org/grandmamoses or call 937-223-4ART (4278).

"Life is what you make it. Always has been. Always will be."

—-Anna Mary Robertson, best known as Grandma Moses

She began life as a hard-working farm girl and didn’t begin painting seriously until she was 78 years old. Anna Mary Robertson Moses then became an international sensation, charming everyone with her colorful depictions of life in rural America and her down-to-earth personality.

“American Sampler: Grandma Moses and the Handicraft Tradition” opens this weekend at the Dayton Art Institute and offers a unique perspective on the work of the famous self-taught folk artist whose paintings, which originally sold for $1 or $2 are now priced from $25,000 to $250,000. The show runs through Feb. 21.

“She was the first art world superstar, taken up by the mass media,” said Jane Kallir, a New York gallery owner who has a special connection to Moses and will be coming to Dayton to share stories about her life and work. Kallir, who will speak in Dayton on Dec. 10, is the granddaughter of Otto Kallir who is credited with discovering Grandma Moses as an artist and presenting the first exhibit of her work at his New York gallery. His granddaughter is now the director of the Galerie St. Etienne, which has loaned work for the Dayton exhibition.

In conjunction with the show, the DAI will feature "Visions and Dreams: Threaded Works by Mary Borkowski." This folk artist, who was born in Sulpher Lick Springs, Ohio, spent much of her life in Dayton and died in 2008.

Borkowski began quilting in 1930 and later created work that she called “thread painting.” These creations were done on silk, felt and velvet with silk thread and yarn.

About the exhibit

We’re predicting this art exhibit will appeal to a wide variety of folks including those who are enamored with folk art and those who love needlework. Youngsters will like it too — they’ll be able to recognize the animals, and will be introduced to the familiar and charming scenes of everyday life in a simpler time.

The show includes 50 works by Moses including paintings, embroideries and a quilt. She was born on a farm in upstate New York, learned to sew as a child, and left home at age 12 to earn her living as a “hired girl.” She ended up on the cover of “Time” magazine and as the subject of an interview with the renowned broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. You’ll see that fascinating interview as part of the DAI show.

Moses, who lived from 1860 to 1961, had done some painting over the years but began painting seriously after arthritis made it difficult for her to embroider and she couldn’t be as useful around the farm. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, the DAI’s chief curator, said this is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on the formal relationships between the handicraft produced by Anna Mary Robertson and her paintings.

“She learned how to mend, patch and tailor clothing and make things like quilts when she worked as a hired girl on farms caring for other families,” said DeGalan. “We have the only authenticated quilt she made in the exhibition.”

DeGalan, who spent four years working in Vermont before coming to Dayton, said she saw a lot of the work of Grandma Moses during those years. “I remember thinking that the way she painted and compartmentalized different zones in the background really looked like a patchwork quilt.”

DeGalan’s idea for the Dayton exhibit was to look at Grandma Moses through the framework of her handcraft. When you look at her paintings, said DeGalan, you can see that many of her brushstrokes look like needlework.

The exhibit includes a recreation of Grandma Moses’ studio and features two filmed interviews recorded in 1950 and 1955.

The “sampling” in the exhibit’s title refers to the way Moses “sampled” from a variety of other media, including popular culture prints, such as Currier & Ives. She sometimes traced the images from other sources and even pasted them into her work.

Meet Jane Kallir

Otto Kallir, Jane Kallir’s grandfather, gave Grandma Moses her first exhibition in 1940 and continued to represent her for the rest of her life. That first show was entitled “What a Farm Wife Painted.”

“I met her once, but I was only three years old,” Kallir said. “My grandfather was the leading dealer in modern art in Vienna before World War II and had a gallery specializing in Austrian expressionists. When Hitler came to Austria, he had to flee and ended up in the the United States.”

Like many refugees fleeing oppression, her grandfather thought America was wonderful. “He loved this country because it had saved his life and my family’s life. But he didn’t like contemporary American art and was looking for artwork that would express all the things he thought were wonderful about the United States. “

He found those things in the work of Anna Mary Robertson.

Her grandfather, Kallir explained, first saw the art thanks to a collector named Louie Calder who worked for the water department for the state of New York. One of his jobs was to travel around the state looking at reservoirs.

“He would pick up stuff on his travels and he happened through the town of Hoosick Falls near where she lived,” Kallir said. “She’d given paintings to a local drug store and they were featured in a women’s exchange at the end of the Depression. This guy Calder saw the pictures, liked them and bought them all. He asked for the painter’s name, visited her and bought everything she had for $1 or $2 dollars.”

It was her grandfather who coined the artist’s name. “He didn’t think her name would be catchy enough; she was completely unknown,” Kallir said. “But she was something of a matriarch in her family and community and people in upstate New York referred to her as Grandma Moses.”

Today, she said, a Grandma Moses painting would start at about $25,000 and go up to $250,000.

Kallir described the artist as very down-to-earth and unpretentious, particularly after she became famous. “Why are you making such a fuss now? You didn’t make a fuss before and I’m the same person,” she was quoted as saying.

Kallir said the age of 80 was less common then than it is today. “Now we have longer life expectancies, but then everyone was amazed she could be doing all of this at such an old age,” Kallir said. “Now she’s taken on renewed relevance.”

About the art

Self-taught painters have no formal art training but invent their own style.

“When you look at that style, you realize how brilliant she was,” Kallir said. “What she does is a combination of abstraction and realism. The figures — the animals and people — are abstractions. They have no illustrative details so they become ciphers that any observer can identify with. But the landscape is very accurately observed: a field on a hot August day when it’s about to thunder; the sun glinting on snow in the middle of January after a heavy storm when the weather is cleared and the kids all come out to ride on their sleds.”

Kallir said Anna Mary was trained to embroider and sew as a little girl and made all of her own dresses. Years later, her own daughter saw an embroidered picture and told her mother she could do that. So Anna Mary Robertson began embroidering pictures.

“When you are working with yarn, you can’t blend colors, so you might have five different shades of green yarn and work them together to get shadows on a tree,” Kallir explains. “What this taught her to do was to break down colors into their component parts, like the Impressionists did but she figured this out on her own.”

Kallir said Grandma Moses understood the way colors worked together and how they reflected the appearance of the natural environment. “Also from her embroidery, she had a feeling for texture. If you look at her trees you can see knots of colors in the paint which correspond to knots one might make out of embroidery.”

Kallir attributes Grandma Moses’ fame to the fact that the general public could relate to her and that she evoked the old American tradition of farming and rural life.

“She was evoking them with these abstract figures and this landscape that connected the past to the present,” Kallir said. “In doing that what she seemed to imply was that for all the changes we’ve lived through, there are certain things that don’t change and we can hold on to and count on. It’s still a really strong message. She said memory and hope were the cornerstones of her work and belief.”

In the last 20 years of her life, Grandma Moses did more than 1,200 paintings.

“She loved painting and anyone who has a reason to live and make their days meaningful will live longer,” believes Kallir. “It has been theorized that toward the last six months of her life — when she was too frail and was in a nursing home — the people there took her brushes away and she lost the will to live.”

About the Author