When you step into an American art museum or gallery, you may find the most eye-catching paintings were made by people who never set foot in art school. One artist took up the brush in her late seventies; another worked on a Louisiana farm, painting on whatever surfaces she could find. Both recorded daily life with a bold, unflinching eye. Neither artist followed the rules of the academy, which is exactly what makes their exceptional work stand out.

This is the world of American folk art: direct and personal, chock full of stories accessible to any eye. In this guide, learn how American folk art differs from “self-taught” art and how two beloved painters, Grandma Moses and Clementine Hunter, captured everyday life and their unique regional traditions from different corners of the country. Beyond the subject matter, explore the humble materials artists used and what collectors should know before acquiring a piece.

Let's dive into the basics: what makes a work of art “folk” in the first place?

Folk Art and Self-Taught Art: Understanding the Terms

Few labels in art history are used as freely, or defined as loosely, as “folk art.” The category first took shape at the turn of the twentieth century, when collectors, dealers and curators sought “a distinctive American art” (MFA Boston n.d.). As such, works in this category depict everyday American life in many media outside the classic artistic canon. Many of these pieces have no known maker; when a name is recorded, it is often a woman or a young girl (Wilson 2021).

Bird of Paradise Quilt Top by Unidentified Artist near Albany, NY. Between 1858-1863. Cotton, wool, and silk with ink and silk embroidery. American Folk Art Museum, New York City.

In its stricter sense, folk art is work made within a community tradition. The maker learned a craft from family, neighbors or an apprenticeship, and the object usually served a purpose in ritual or daily life. Quilts, weathervanes and hunting decoys are classic examples. Skills pass from one generation to the next, and the art follows established decorative standards within the community, with each maker adding modest personal touches.

“Self-taught” describes something related, but different. The American Folk Art Museum notes that the term is increasingly used for artists working today, especially those who came to art through unexpected routes and stand outside the social mainstream. Unlike folk art, these artists usually do not work within an inherited tradition. They build a personal vocabulary, often late in life. While a quilter taught by her grandmother belongs to a folk tradition, a retired worker who begins painting her memories on whatever surface is at hand is better called self-taught.

With that said, the line between the two often blurs. A self-taught artist might work in a style with no connection to traditional folk culture, or they may integrate folk themes and practices into their artwork. In this way, self-taught can serve as a broader umbrella term. For collectors, these distinctions affect how a piece is catalogued, which scholarship applies and how its market can be understood.

What Is American Folk Art?

Zooming in on folk art, this genre encompasses a wide range of objects and styles, produced by makers across the country from the colonial period to the present. It includes portraits of merchant families painted by itinerant artists traveling from town to town, along with ship carvings, painted furniture, trade signs and more. It also includes the vivid canvases of twentieth-century painters who took up the brush later in life and never put it down.

Betsy Ross Sewing the Flag. Circa 1908. Colored print. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 

Even the nation's most familiar symbols have a place here. Homemade flags are widely regarded as folk art, and the Betsy Ross flag, with its ring of thirteen stars, is a good example. According to family tradition, Ross, a Philadelphia upholsterer, sewed the first American flag (though historians have long questioned the story). Whatever its accuracy, the legend inspired generations of handmade flags, embroidered scenes and quilts. These forms of needlework, made at home and shaped by community memory and tradition, fall squarely within folk art.

A shared directness ties together the disparate types of folk art. Folk artists tend to favor flattened space, saturated color and simplified forms. Scale often follows importance rather than reality; a bride or a preacher looms larger than the landscape around it. At one time, critics dismissed these qualities as unrefined. Today, they are widely seen as the source of the work's power, because compositions painted from memory carry an intimacy that polished academic painting often struggles to match.

From Rural Grandmother to Folk Art Legend: Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) spent most of her life as a farm wife and did not become a painter until her late seventies. She was born and raised in rural New York State, where she lived for almost her entire life. She attended rural school sporadically and loved painting as a child. After marrying Thomas Moses in 1887, she farmed and raised her family for nearly two decades in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The couple returned north in 1905 and settled at Eagle Bridge, New York.

She had ten children, five of whom died in childhood; she also worked the dairy farm and won many county fair awards for her household arts and delicious canned goods. When her arthritis made her previous hobby of yarn embroidery too painful to continue, her sister suggested she pick up painting again.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses by Clara Sipprell. Circa 1950. Gelatin on silver print. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

She was around 78 when she took it up in earnest, first by painting landscapes of her local environs. In 1938, a New York collector named Louis Caldor spotted her paintings in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, bought what was available, then brought her work to dealer Otto Kallir of Galerie St. Etienne. He began representing her, and her first solo show opened there in October 1940 under the modest title What a Farm Wife Painted. Within a few years, she was among the country's best-known artists, and the press had settled on the name Grandma Moses. Soon, Grandma Moses' paintings spread throughout the country as popular illustrations and greeting card designs.

She worked entirely from recollection, never from life or photographs, and became one of the twentieth century's leading memory painters. She painted the farm life of her youth and often left out signs of modern life. Her paintings are filled with small figures going about their work, set in wide landscapes with seasonal color.

First Wagon on Cambridge Pike by Grandma Moses. 1944. Tempera and gouache on cardboard. M.S. Rau (sold). 

In First Wagon on Cambridge Pike, Moses brings the pioneering spirit of early Cambridge Valley to life through this intimate portrait of country life. The title refers to the historic Cambridge Pike in Washington County, New York, near the Vermont border where her ancestor settled in the 1770s. In her 1952 autobiography, Moses proudly recalled that he “built the first wagon that ever ran over the Cambridge Pike.” Here, she brings that family story to life: oxen and draft horses gather beside stacks of timber, workers tend to wagons and livestock, and farmhouses spread across the rolling countryside. Her distinctive flattened perspective lets the eye travel easily from one small episode to the next, turning the landscape into a lively panorama of work, family and community.

Over the last twenty-five years of her life, she made some 1,500 to 2,000 paintings. She died in 1961 at 101, having captured the rural American spirit and representing the pinnacle of folk art's ethos.

Southern Folk Art Paintings

Where Moses painted the farms of upstate New York, many of the most celebrated self-taught artists of the twentieth century worked in rural Southern communities, often with little money or access to materials. As a result, artists largely created their work from whatever was at hand; they made paintings and assemblages from scrap metal, house paint, cardboard and found objects.

These works are rooted in Southern life: faith, labor, memory and the landscape. Many of these artists were Black Southerners whose lives were shaped by the legacies of slavery, followed by sharecropping and Jim Crow. That history is rarely far from the painterly surface. Sometimes it appears in direct scenes of labor or in expressions of faith and survival. Among the most celebrated examples are Clementine Hunter paintings, which vividly depict life in Louisiana’s Cane River region.

The Life and Artwork of Clementine Hunter

Clementine Hunter by Judith Sedgwick. Circa 1976-1981. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University, Massachusetts. 

Born Clementine or Clemence Reuben (1886/1887-1988), she was the granddaughter of slaves and was born at Hidden Hill Plantation in Louisiana into a sharecropping family. She spent nearly her entire life in Louisiana's Cane River Region, where she worked at the nearby Melrose Plantation starting at fourteen or fifteen. Working in the cotton fields as a girl, she attended school only briefly and never learned to read.

In the 1940s, Melrose became a retreat for visiting writers and artists, which gave Hunter her first real access to painting materials. Around 1940, in her fifties, she utilized some paints a visiting artist had left behind. Her first painting, made on a window shade, showed a baptism in Cane River. Upon completing the painting, she showed it to two semi-permanent guests at Melrose- François Mignon and James Register- who, in turn, greatly encouraged her to continue and supplied her with materials. 

Cotton Picking Scene by Clementine Hunter. 20th century. Oil on board. M.S. Rau.

She painted in the evenings after the workday. Her earliest pieces utilized whatever she could get her hands on: gourds, bottles, cardboard and house paint. With the patronage of Mignon and Register, she used canvas board and canvas more often, as well as oil paint or watercolor. Hunter was mostly a memory painter, like Grandma Moses, though she also painted still lifes, especially bouquets of zinnias, which became one of her favorite subjects.

Her subjects drew on plantation life, portraying people at work, at the local church or in leisurely moments. The canvases depicted the rhythms of her community: picking cotton and pecans, washing days, weddings, funerals, baptisms and Saturday nights.

In Cotton Picking Scene (above), three women in bright clothing and broad-brimmed hats cross a field, each hauling a large white sack of cotton against a softly colored landscape and pale blue sky. The long, narrow board turns the field into a frieze of labor straight from Hunter's own life. The thick, expressive brushwork and flattened forms are hallmarks of her style.

Cane River Church Gathering by Hunter. 20th century. Oil on board. M.S. Rau.

Cane River Church Gathering shows the non-labor side of her world. Set before a white church trimmed in green, the scene presents neighbors gathered in procession, carrying bright bouquets and coming together in faith, ceremony and fellowship. Simplified figures in purple clothing flow across the composition, giving the painting a joyful sense of movement and transforming a local religious gathering into a powerful record of shared community life. Both works bear her signature monogram “CH.”

Though she painted only in the second half of her life, she was extremely prolific over those forty years, creating several thousand works. Her depictions of Black Southern life from the inside, with honesty and affection, explain why Hunter is known today as one of the best-known American folk artists from the twentieth century. Indeed, she was the first black artist to exhibit a one-person show at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) in 1955.

Collecting American Folk Art: Provenance, Condition and Authentication

Collecting folk art rewards a careful eye. Many works were made outside the art world's record-keeping, so the usual paper trail can be thin, and forgeries of the most well-known folk artists have been reported. Fortunately, a few fundamentals, from provenance to condition, can steer buyers toward works they can trust.

Provenance is the documented history of a work's ownership, and it matters a great deal here. Many folk artists were unknown for most, if not all, of their lifetimes. Hence, a clear chain of ownership is valuable—letters, exhibition records, receipts, or even photographs of the artist with the work all help.

Grandma Moses (right) with her painting Battle of Bennington. Photo by Roger Higgins for the New York World-Telegram & Sun. 1953. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Grandma Moses's paintings often carry the history of the Galerie St. Etienne, the dealer that first showed her in 1940. Hunter's works, by contrast, often passed directly from the artist to neighbors, visitors and local collectors. The two Hunter paintings in M.S. Rau's collection, for example, both come from a private Louisiana collection.

Authentication is the most important issue, particularly with Hunter. She painted thousands of works and has no published catalogue raisonné, which makes fakes harder to prove. In the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of paintings attributed to her hit the market, prompting a federal examination of whether they were forgeries. In 2010, a federal grand jury indicted three people in connection with the scheme, and in 2011, one admitted that he had painted many of the fraudulent works.

The lesson for collectors is to buy from established dealers, ask for provenance and expert opinions, and be cautious of works that look too fresh or too perfect. Here at Rau, we vet each work for authenticity, condition and provenance before offering it, giving collectors exactly the assurance this market calls for.

So much of American folk art's appeal is that it tells the stories of ordinary people in their own voices. Whether from the North or South, these artists distilled their communities' cultural connections and the joy of rural living. Neither Grandma Moses nor Clementine Hunter had formal training, yet both left bodies of work treasured by museums and collectors alike. These works are not only beautiful in their apparent simplicity, but even more so because of the history of the people who made them.

Works Cited

• American Folk Art Museum. n.d. Self-Taught Genius: A Curriculum Guide for Teachers K-12. New York: American Folk Art Museum, Education Department.
• Hinrichs, Kit, and Delphine Hirasuna. 2001. Long May She Wave: A Graphic History of the American Flag. Photographs by Terry Heffernan. Ten Speed Press.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. n.d. “Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art.” Exhibition page, February 6, 2021-January 10, 2022. Accessed October 27, 2026.
• Pizzolato, Bre. 2024. “For Real: A Closer Look Cracks the Case of a Longtime Clementine Hunter Forger.” inRegister, October 1, 2024.
• Rosenak, Chuck, and Jan Rosenak. 1990. Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. New York: Abbeville Press.
• Wilson, Kristina. “What Do US Museums Mean When They Talk about Folk Art?” Apollo Magazine, June 15, 2021.