Minnie Smith Reinhardt (1898–1986) was an American naïve painter, known for her memory paintings. Sometimes called the "

Grandma Moses Anna Mary Robertson Moses (September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961), or Grandma Moses, was an American folk artist. She began painting in earnest at the age of 78 and is a prominent example of a newly successful art career at an advanced age. H ...

Catawba County Catawba County is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 160,610. Its county seat is Newton, North Carolina, Newton, and its largest city is Hick ...

", Reinhardt grew up in the community of Jugtown, today called

Vale A vale is a type of valley. Vale may also refer to: Places Georgia * Vale, Georgia, a town in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region Norway * Våle, a historic municipality Portugal * Vale (Santa Maria da Feira), a former civil parish in the municipali ...

. One of eleven children, she helped out on the family farm from an early age. She also attended school, where she was able to draw. Aged about eighteen, she took a position as a cook at Lenoir-Rhyne College in

Hickory Hickory is a common name for trees composing the genus ''Carya'', which includes around 18 species. Five or six species are native to China, Indochina, and India (Assam), as many as twelve are native to the United States, four are found in Mexi ...

. There she performed numerous housekeeping duties; she also learned to sew, which she would do for people around the county. She also helped out in the fields, and raised the six children she had with Belton Reinhardt. The family home burned to the ground in 1932, and the family lived in the

granary A granary is a storehouse or room in a barn for threshed grain or animal feed. Ancient or primitive granaries are most often made of pottery. Granaries are often built above the ground to keep the stored food away from mice and other animal ...

until a new home could be constructed. By 1974 Reinhardt's vision had become so reduced by

cataract A cataract is a cloudy area in the lens of the eye that leads to a decrease in vision. Cataracts often develop slowly and can affect one or both eyes. Symptoms may include faded colors, blurry or double vision, halos around light, trouble w ...

s that she was unable to distinguish shapes and colors. Surgery restored her sight, and the experience pushed her to begin painting once more, using oil paints given to her by her daughter Arie Taylor. As a painter she was entirely self-taught. Her works depict a variety of daily activities remembered from her youth. She painted daily at a small desk in front of a window in her home, and was extremely prolific before her death. Her husband made frames for many of her finished paintings. Reinhardt and her husband are buried in the cemetery of Corinth Baptist Church in Vale. Reinhardt was the subject of an exhibit at the

Hickory Museum of Art Hickory Museum of Art (HMA) is an art museum in Hickory, North Carolina which holds exhibitions, events, and public educational programs based on a permanent collection of 19th to 21st century American art. The museum also features a long-term e ...

in 1996. Today that museum owns numerous examples of her work, as well as the desk at which she painted. She is the subject of a catalog, ''Mine's My Style: The Paintings of Minnie Reinhardt'', published in conjunction with the museum exhibition of her work.

References

1898 births 1986 deaths American women painters 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women artists People from Vale, Lincoln County, North Carolina Painters from North Carolina Naïve painters Women outsider artists Outsider artists {{US-painter-1890s-stub