Mose Ernest Tolliver was a disabled African-American folk art

Folk art

Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic....

ist who worked in a primitivist

Naïve art

Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true...

 style. He was known as "Mose T", after the signature on his paintings.

Biography

Tolliver was born one of 12 children to sharecroppers Ike and Laney Tolliver in Pintlala, near Montgomery, Alabama

Montgomery, Alabama

Montgomery is the capital of the U.S. state of Alabama, and is the county seat of Montgomery County. It is located on the Alabama River southeast of the center of the state, in the Gulf Coastal Plain. As of the 2010 census, Montgomery had a population of 205,764 making it the second-largest city...

. His exact year of birth is unknown, though it is known he was born on the Fourth of July. He married his childhood friend, Willie Mae Thomas, in the 1940s and had 13 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood.

During the late 1960s, after a severe injury, he turned to painting to combat boredom and long hours of idle time. Tolliver was self-taught and signed his work, "Mose T" with a backward "s". He regularly worked with "pure house paint" on plywood

Plywood

Plywood is a type of manufactured timber made from thin sheets of wood veneer. It is one of the most widely used wood products. It is flexible, inexpensive, workable, re-usable, and can usually be locally manufactured...

, creating whimsical and sometimes erotic pictures of animals, humans, and flora. A "Quail Bird" may glide over a cotton field, or a spread-leg "Diana" may be straddled over "An Exercise Rack Bicycle. Never able to walk well following his injury, he painted many self portrait

Self Portrait

Self Portrait is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's tenth studio album, released by Columbia Records in June 1970.Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions...

s with crutches. Watermelons and birds were also familiar themes. Tolliver's themes were drawn from his own experience.

Tolliver was dyslexic, which may have encouraged his artistic efforts by limiting his reading and writing abilities. He would often turn his paintings upside-down and paint the picture of perhaps an animal and landscape positioned from various directions. The composition of Toliver titles are wildly divergent; "Smoke Charlies", "Scopper Bugs" or "Jick Jack Suzy Satisfying her own Self".

Tolliver's work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia College of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is a museum located in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, featuring several art collections. For seventy years, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has been a showcase for the visual arts in Central Alabama...

, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art

Corcoran Gallery of Art

The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...

. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City. Relatives of Tolliver have imitated his style and signed their work as he did, making it sometimes difficult for collectors to find an original painting.

Tolliver died from pneumonia at age 82 on October 30, 2006 in Montgomery, Alabama

Montgomery, Alabama

Montgomery is the capital of the U.S. state of Alabama, and is the county seat of Montgomery County. It is located on the Alabama River southeast of the center of the state, in the Gulf Coastal Plain. As of the 2010 census, Montgomery had a population of 205,764 making it the second-largest city...

.

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