Mose Tolliver
(1924–2006)
BornPike Road, Alabama, United States
DiedMontgomery, Alabama, United States
BiographyIn his many self-portraits, Mose Tolliver—or Mose T., as he signed his name, with a backward “S”—intensely distorted his features into near abstraction. His works vividly reimagined what he observed in the people and nature of Alabama, with his subjects ranging from empty buses recalling the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott against segregation to boldly erotic works. Landscapes, animals and fantastic hybrid creatures, numerous watermelons, and scenes of rural life appear across his hundreds of pieces. They have a lyrical quality, as he used a muted palette of house paints and thick, fluid brushstrokes, painting wet on wet so that the colors mixed on the surfaces, which included plywood, cardboard, Masonite, and salvaged materials mounted with pop-tops that he saved from soda and beer cans.Mose Ernest Tolliver (whose name also appears as Moses) was born around the early 1920s (no official record was made) to tenant farmers in Pike Road in rural Montgomery County, Alabama. Like many Black children at the time in the American South, his education was limited. He later moved to Montgomery and worked a range of jobs, including as a carpenter, landscaper, and plumber. In the late 1960s, he had an accident at a furniture factory that left him unable to work or to walk without the use of crutches. Although he stated that he had painted before the accident, he started actively creating art as a way to occupy himself. Some of his earliest paintings were on tree roots and discarded glass. “When I got hurt, I had more time to paint, and wood was a whole lot easier to get hold of,” he said in an interview with William Arnett of Souls Grown Deep. He usually worked sitting on his bed, with pieces of plywood balanced on his knees, and the size of his works was shaped by this process. He installed his paintings in his yard and began selling them to passersby and giving them to friends and neighbors.
Tolliver came to wider regional recognition through a 1981 solo show at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and then achieved national acclaim when he was included in Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1982. He continued to paint into his later years, pausing for a time after the death of his wife, Willie Mae Thomas, in 1991. He died in 2006.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
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