Join Us for Community Day – Admission FREE!

On Saturday, July 8 from 10 am to 5 pm admission to the Bennington Museum is free for all visitors.  Join us for a day of Celebrating Grandma Moses: American Modern.  Among the many activities planned for you are Grandma Moses: Painter and Grandma, a presentation from 11:00 am to– 12:00 noon by Ken Gottry, with special guest, Harry Moses.

10:00 – 12:00 noon and 1:00 – 4:00  Milk Benita, the museum “cow,” churn butter, and learn how to make Moses muffins from Granma’s own recipe book.

11:00  Ken Gottry and Harry L. Moses present Grandma Moses: painter and grandma in the Ada Paresky Education Center.  Grandma Moses was more than a world-famous primitive painter who met President Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the sparkling little lady who worked hard, had a quick mind, and loved her family. In this presentation, Ken Gottry shows both sides of Moses, the painter and the grandmother. Ken, in addition to being a local historian, married one of Grandma’s great granddaughters so has an exhaustive collection of photos and many stories to share.

1:00 to 3:00  Will Moses, great grandson of Grandma Moses, joins us in the bookstore signing his books and other products.

1:30  See the Jerome Hill film, Grandma Moses in the Ada Paresky Education Center

2:00  View Jane Kallir’s talk, The Life of Grandma Moses recorded at the 2016 Shelburne Museum Symposium

3:00 View Jamie Franklin’s talk, Grandma Moses and Modernism, recorded at the 2016 Shelburne Msueum Symposium

4:00 See the Jerome Hill Film, Grandma Moses

There will be Moses-inspired art activities in the Schoolhouse plus “community story-telling.”  If you want to get outdoors, take a walk on the George Aiken Wildflower Trail where a new Trail Tale has been installed.  Designed for the younger folks, enjoy “Planting the Wild Garden.” Walk the trail and enjoy stopping at each post for another bit from this wonderful book.  And don’t miss the Children’s Sculpture Garden in the Hadwen Woods.

Grandma Moses: American Modern

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.  But she was so much more than a homespun folk hero.  The popular view is that she simply painted scenes remembered from her childhood.  In fact, she was a highly skilled artist who refined her art through practice and created a unique world of her own imagining.  She combined multiple perspectives in the same painting and used collage and popular imagery, unconsciously paralleling the techniques of Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art.  Join us and see Moses through a modernist lens, as we compare side-by-side Grandma Moses paintings with works by iconic Modernists and folk artists.  You may be surprised.

Grandma Moses: American Modern is supported by

Bennington Potters and The Bank of Bennington

Media Sponsor