Grandma Moses - by Leslie Umberger & Randall R Griffey (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A major reexamination of the life, art, and legacy of a self-taught American master

Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work explores how an unlikely artist--marginalized in her time for being elderly, female, and untrained--catapulted into the American imagination in the 1940s and 1950s. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) was eighty years old when Otto Kallir, a New York art dealer and recent émigré from Nazi-held Austria, introduced her to the world. "Grandma Moses," as the press dubbed her, quickly became a polarizing figure, beloved by the public but belittled by an art world that objected to her story-time scenes and lack of formal training.

Drawing on Moses's own metaphor of her life as "a good day's work," the book charts Moses's creative development from her earliest artistic efforts to the emergence of her signature style, revealing a multidimensional artist who melded direct observation of nature with personal memories to tell idiosyncratic yet compelling stories. It positions Moses as a central figure in the history of twentieth-century American art, a painter whose life and work bore witness to the Civil War, two world wars, and the civil rights era.

Beautifully illustrated, Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work captures the indomitable spirit Moses brought to her artmaking, conveying a candor and authority that still resonate today with the quest for a homespun American visual tradition.

Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Exhibition Schedule
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
October 24, 2025-July 12, 2026

About the Author

Leslie Umberger is curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where Randall R. Griffey is head curator and Eleanor Jones Harvey is senior curator. Erika Doss holds the Edith O'Donnell Distinguished Chair in Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Stacy C. Hollander is a scholar of American self-taught art and former deputy director of curatorial affairs, chief curator, and director of exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Katherine Jentleson is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Jane Kallir is president of the Kallir Research Institute in New York.