NEW YORK, NY.- Hammer Galleries announced its exhibition Winter 2013: Selected works by Grandma Moses and other American Masters, February 11 – March 31, 2013. An interactive Virtual Tour of the exhibition is now available on the gallery’s website, www.hammergalleries.com.

Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Moses is the quintessential American folk artist. She is also the embodiment of the American success story. In her late seventies, she began painting primitive scenes recalled from her youth. Within a few years, her work was being purchased by avid collectors and shown in museums.

Anna Mary Robertson was born on a farm in upstate New York in 1860. At age 12 she worked as a hired girl, doing the housekeeping, cooking and tending the sick and elderly. Fifteen years later, she married farmhand Thomas Moses and moved to Virginia, where they rented a farm. She bore 10 children, five of whom died in infancy. Her life was typical of a farmwife of the day ─ constant work. After 18 years, the family returned to Eagle Bridge and bought a dairy farm.

After her husband’s death in 1927, Grandma Moses stayed on the farm, now run by one of her sons. When she became too old to work outside, she started stitching worsted-yarn pictures to pass the time. When arthritis made stitching too painful, her family suggested she try painting. In 1938, three of her paintings were displayed in a drugstore window in nearby Hoosick Falls. These works caught the eye of the collector Louis Caldor, who launched her career as a painter.

Like Currier and Ives, who inspired some of her early work, Grandma Moses created works that evoked a nostalgic response from the public. In brightly colored, well-organized compositions, she depicted a simpler way of life that had vanished from a swiftly modernizing America.

Moses continued to paint until a few months before her death at age 101 in 1961. In 1964, the Hammer Galleries began to formally exhibit Moses’ work. Over the years, the Hammer Galleries has held several solo exhibitions of her work in addition to numerous group exhibitions.

The Hammer Galleries’ Winter 2013 exhibition features a dozen paintings by Grandma Moses, including several major snow scenes. Also on display are exceptional works by George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, Robert Henri, William McGregor Paxton, Francis Augustus Silva, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Wimar and Andrew Wyeth.