☕️ Coffee 10:30 AM | Lecture 11:00 AM

🎟 Free & open to the public Leslie Umberger

Senior Curator (Folk and Self-Taught Art)

Smithsonian American Art Museum

“Grandma Moses:  A Good Day’s Work” During her lifetime, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860 – 1961) experienced seismic historical shifts including the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and two world wars. She was eighty years old in 1940, when her paintings of old-timey rural life unexpectedly made her the most famous female American artist of the coming decade. “Grandma Moses,” as she was dubbed by the press, became a media sensation, achieving a superstar celebrity that raised questions in her time and remains intriguing today. In “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work,” Leslie Umberger will discuss the ways in which Moses defied the odds of her age and sex, located a unique creative voice, and ultimately positioned herself as a central figure in the story of twentieth-century American art. She will reveal Moses’s creative practice as being grounded in personal experience and point of view, and highlight the ways in which Moses consistently wielded creativity, hope, and unity as tools for shaping a life that she would later reflect on as “a good day’s work.”​ Although Moses’s life began and concluded in New York State, Umberger will give special focus to a little-known chapter of Moses’s life story: the eighteen years she and her family spent in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Leslie Umberger is the senior curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She joined the museum’s staff in 2012 and has since expanded and refined the museum’s internationally recognized collection of work by untrained artists, initiated in 1970. Umberger has long focused on artists who navigated autonomous artistic paths, often in the face of significant oppression or personal challenge and been dedicated to broadening the scope of American art by illuminating the work of community-taught, family-taught, and self-taught artists. Umberger is currently part of the curatorial team reinstalling SAAM’s collection galleries across the museum, and, with Randall R. Griffey, is co-curator of Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work. Other noteworthy projects include the retrospective exhibition: Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (2018-19) and the reinstallation of SAAM’s galleries for folk and self-taught art (2016). Between Worlds was accompanied by a major monograph, co -published by SAAM and Princeton University Press (2018), for which Umberger was awarded the Secretary’s Research Prize for a single-author book.