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PAINTING AT HOME WITH GRANDMA MOSES HIGHLIGHTS ARTIST’S INFLUENCES AND TECHNIQUES
SHELBURNE AND BENNINGTON MUSEUMS COLLABORATE IN ONLINE EXHIBITION
SHELBURNE, Vt. (June 15, 2020)—Painting at Home with Grandma Moses, a new online exhibition featuring paintings and archival materials from the collections of Shelburne Museum and Bennington Museum in partnership with Grandma Moses Properties Co., launches Thursday with a webinar preview. Shelburne Museum Associate Curator Carolyn Bauer and Director Thomas Denenberg, as well as Bennington Museum’s Executive Director Joshua Torrance and Curator Jamie Franklin, will discuss the exhibition and extend a live Q&A.
Painting at Home with Grandma Moses highlights Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses’s methodical artistic process and varying sources of inspiration that reveal the artist’s work as complex, thoughtful, and thoroughly modern. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s landscapes of the imagination for the modern era that stir feelings of nostalgia for decades past. The exhibition is accompanied by interactive experiences including recorded talks from curators, conservation insights and educational activities.
“This interactive exhibition provides an in-depth analysis of Moses’s artistic influences and techniques,” said Associate Curator Carolyn Bauer, who organized the exhibition in partnership with Bennington Museum. “Throughout Painting at Home with Grandma Moses there are insightful object comparatives exemplifying the varying methods this beloved artist applied to create her recognizable paintings, including popular source materials and her ability to combine real and imagined memories.”
This is not the first time Shelburne and Bennington museums have collaborated on a Moses exhibition. In 2016-17 the museums presented the exhibition and catalog Grandma Moses: American Modern.
“When the Bennington and Shelburne museums collaborated on Grandma Moses: American Modern it was a perfect match,” said Bennington Curator Jaime Franklin. “Now in 2020, with the pandemic forcing museums to think outside the box, collaborations are more important than ever. Over the last three months, as museums across the globe have quickly pivoted to providing content and programming online, Bennington and Shelburne have been leaders in our state. I am totally delighted that we could renew our collaboration, this time to share Moses’s work to the world via the online exhibition Painting at Home with Grandma Moses.”
Painting at Home with Grandma Moses is the third exclusively online exhibition launched by Shelburne Museum since temporarily closing due to the coronavirus pandemic. The first, Color, Pattern, Whimsy, & Scale, is an exploration of museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb’s passion for American folk art and her collecting ethos as she assembled one of the earliest and largest collections that would become the foundation for the museum. The second, American Stories, draws inspiration from Shelburne’s vast holdings of American art, architecture and material culture, to examine the American experience in four parts —People, Travel, Home and Community.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by The Donna and Marvin Schwartz Foundation and the Barnstormers at Shelburne Museum.
About Shelburne Museum: Founded in 1947 by pioneering folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses, John Singleton Copley, and many more. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org
IMAGE CAPTIONS:
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961), Bennington, 1953. Oil on pressed board, 17 3/4 x 24 in. Collection of Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, museum purchase. 1986.347. Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Moses created this painting, Bennington, which prominently features the distinctive U-shaped Bennington Museum building, gray with white columns, as it looked in 1937.
Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses (American, 1860-1961), After the Wedding, 1942. Oil on Masonite, 17 3/4 x 30 1/4 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum. 1965-59.1. Copyright © Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York.
Although the Checkered Inn burned in 1907, Moses painted the structure from memory many times over the course of her career, and After the Wedding is the earliest known version.
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