Wednesday, Jan. 4 at 7 p.m.—RUTLAND—Shelburne Museum director Thomas Denenberg will explore the work of beloved painter “Grandma” Moses in a talk at the Rutland Free Library on Wednesday, Jan. 4 at 7 p.m. The event, “Grandma Moses: American Modern,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.
Denenberg’s illustrated lecture will examine the work of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860-1961) and counter her marginalization as a pop culture phenomenon by placing her career within the context of mid-century American culture and modernist art.
Denenberg is the director of Shelburne Museum. Prior to moving to Vermont in 2011, he served as the chief curator and deputy director of the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine), curator of American art at Reynolda House (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecticut). He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Winterthur and taught undergraduates and graduate students at Boston University, Harvard, and Wake Forest. He is the author of “Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America” and “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place,” and edited and/or contributed to several other books, including “Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory.”
The Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays series is held on the first Wednesday of every month from October through May in nine communities statewide, featuring speakers of national and regional renown. Talks in Rutland are held at Rutland Free Library unless otherwise noted. All First Wednesdays talks are free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Rutland Free Library at 802-773-1860, or contact the Vermont Humanities Council at 802-262-2626 or visit vermonthumanities.org.
Photo courtesy of wikimedia.org; by Roger Higgins
The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division is the source of this cropped version of Grandma Moses donating her painting “Battle of Bennington” to Mrs. George Kuhner who accepts it for DAR.
