About the artist
c. 1918–2006, lived and worked in and around Montgomery, AlabamaBorn into a large sharecropping family outside Montgomery sometime between 1915 and 1920, “Mose T.”––as he signed all his paintings––like so many self-taught American artists, only enjoyed enough leisure time to pursue his artistic practice once he could no longer work. Early employment as a tenant farmer and gardener allowed him to support his own growing family, but an ill-fated job for a furniture factory in the late 1960s resulted in his legs being crushed by a slab of marble. Perhaps on a whim, perhaps motivated by a local art exhibition, perhaps on the suggestion of a friend, Tolliver began painting, ending a period of inertia, depression, and drinking. Engaging in the great Southern African American tradition of yard art, he began displaying his paintings outside his Montgomery home, initially offering them for sale at one dollar each.
It all changed quickly, price-wise and otherwise, once his work joined the illustrious ranks of the 1982 “Black Folk Art in America” exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Still preferring to paint perched on the edge of his bed, suddenly Tolliver found himself the subject of intense interest from art collectors, curators, and critics. He continued to work with housepaint on plywood, exploring similar subjects, but productivity became an issue for this already prolific artist. Later in his life, his daughter Annier, an accomplished painter in her own right, collaborated on many of her father’s works, functioning as a studio assistant and apprentice. Tolliver’s highly stylized portraits and images of nature tend toward strident palette choices, often juxtaposing a figure in front of an abstract, pointillist background of rarefied, pulsating polka-dots. Much of his work is plainly erotic, involving sideshow-worthy displays of anatomical prowess and distortion. Tolliver’s appealing paintings, among the most beloved and most widely collected of 20th-century American self-taught works, can be viewed in the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: Photo of Mose Tolliver, courtesy of Marcia Weber
Bibliography
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
Contemporary American Folk, Naïve, and Outsider Art: Into the Mainstream? Oxford, OH: Miami University Art Museum, 1990.
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
Perry, Regenia A. What It Is: Black American Folk Art from the Collection of Regenia Perry. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1982.
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.
Transmitters: The Isolate Artist in America. Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Art, 1981.
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.