Grandma Moses A Good Day’s Work exhibit at Smithsonian American Art Museum

 Today I visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to see Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work exhibit. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), universally known as Grandma Moses, I learned today, was a beloved American folk artist who launched her celebrated career depicting idyllic rural scenes in a self-taught, vibrant style, becoming famous in her late 70s.

Grandma Moses did not begin her illustrious painting career until she was nearly 80 years old. For decades, she was a farm wife, mother of ten, and meticulous embroiderer, using wool to create "worsted pictures." It was the arthritis in her hands, making the finer work of needlepoint too painful, that forced her to pivot to paint. This forced transition—a seemingly small adjustment in medium—unlocked her true genius.

Her paintings quickly transitioned from being small, homemade gifts to major museum acquisitions, launched by a chance discovery in a Hoosick Falls, New York, drugstore window. She sold her first work for a modest $5. Within a few years, her "The Old Checkered House" had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and her work became so popular that Hallmark even licensed her images for greeting cards.

The works I saw at the Smithsonian were predominantly her rural scenes: harvests, pumpkins, turkeys, horses, cows, village greens, winter skating parties, gardens in bloom, and farms in the soft glow of autumn light. What makes them unique isn’t just what is depicted, but how she invites us to inhabit each scene.

In her art, the ordinary is never small. In her own way, she makes a radical claim: that beauty is ordinary, that labor is luminous, that everyday life is worthy of attention. Her paintings aren’t gestures of abstraction; they are testaments to lived rhythms, to seasons felt in body and mind.

Her art reminded me that the world is rich with texture if we can slow down enough to see it: the way wind bends trees in autumn, the way snow gathers at the edges of fences, the way human gatherings—however simple—contain joy. Grandma Moses taught me today that there is depth everywhere—if we look.

Pumpkins, 1959, oil on high-density fiberboard
Can you believe she painted this at the age of 99?