Whether you refer to him as a self-taught artist or a folk artist, Mose Tolliver is a legend and an inspiration. Disabled when a crate of marble fell on his feet and legs, Tolliver turned to art in order to “keep his head together.” But not everyone who practices art therapeutically gains the recognition that Tolliver achieved.
So how did Mose T, as he was known, transform from a gardener/housepainter/ shipping employee into an internationally known and respected folk artist? The answer to this question can be found in Anton Haardt’s book Mose T, A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver.
Haardt and Tolliver could not be more different. As the Foreword notes, Haardt was an “accomplished young woman from a socially prominent Alabama family” while Tolliver was a “middle-aged, partially disabled African American painter.” But, they were both artists in Montgomery Alabama. Haardt was drawn to Tolliver’s pictures – with fantastical titles like Jimma Jamma Girl and X-Ray Dry Bones Charlie – which were often displayed in his front yard. Neighbors and artists would often pay him one or two dollars per picture.
In this collection of anecdotes and quotes from Tolliver’s life, alongside an abecedarian compendium of some of his art, Haardt has given the world an opportunity to know Tolliver the way she did. Haardt even includes a timeline of important dates and exhibitions throughout Tolliver’s career.
Mose Tolliver died October 31, 2006. He was in his 80s. Haardt’s book is a must-read for art lovers, as well as for those who think art is only for the wealthy.
Mose T showed us all there is art in doing what you love and loving what you do.
--Bernadette Geyer
Bernadette Geyer is a freelance writer and editor. Geyer is the author of the chapbook WHAT REMAINS (Argonne House Press), and recipient of a Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County. She has also written non-fiction for publications such as GoNOMAD, Slow Travel Berlin, and WRITERS' Journal.
Montgomery Alabama Folk Artist Annie Tolliver died March 13, 2018 after an extended illness.
Annie Tolliver, as a child, used to draw in the dirt yard of Stern Field Alley outside the home where she was born in Montgomery, Alabama. She said that her father, Mose Tolliver, was the first to influence her art. When the family gathered to share a meal they all watched Mose work. Annie started out wanting to paint like her daddy but she said that she later developed a style more her own. Her subjects are her own, with many more details such as tiny white teeth, delicate lace trim on the clothing, and pretty polished fingernails. She painted portraits of her father, her daughters with their bright pink hula hoops, her son gone fishing, or her nieces on a shopping spree. Her brightly colored portraits have a wonderful joy of life.
We have lost one Deep South's great self-taught artists and a good friend.
Annie, may you rest in peace, to the free skies glad and strong.
]]>Purvis Young was born on February 4, 1943 in Liberty City, Miami, FL. Currently Resides: Overtown, Miami, FL. He was first discovered by the art community in 1972 when he painted a series of murals on a row of abandoned buildings called "Good Bread Alley" in the economically depressed section of Miami known as Overtown.
His work is in some ways like a Pollock. Although Purvis was untutored his art has a sophisticated style and at the same time emotional fury, with a look of contemporary sophistication. His doodle-like symbols recall similarly repeated swirls and scribbles found in contemporary expressionist art, as well as in cultural practices found in isolated areas such as art of the Aborigines in Australia.
Purvis Young’s art, which over the years has gained international acclaim, has come into focus recently when David Byrne, on his first album in ten years “American Utopia", featured on its cover Young's art.
Byrne said that he chose Purvis Young’s art because of his "visual meditations are based upon the plight of the underprivileged, racism in America, urban strife and African-American experiences in the South". David Byrne’s worldwide tour promoting his new album takes him to New Orleans Jazz Festival on April 29, 2018.
"VISION SEEKERS" By Jason Berry
Anton Haardt felt a magnetic pull to the pink "dinosaur birds" and strange shapings of fruits, animals and human bodies that Mose Tolliver, working on scrap wood, was selling in his yard.
"Mose Tolliver used to hang his paintings in a tree outside his home in Montgomery, Ala., pricing them at one or two dollars a piece," writes Anton Haardt in Mose T. From A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver, a forthcoming biography, lushly illustrated, by the woman whose eponymous Magazine Street gallery has perhaps the city's most extensive inventory of high-quality works by black Southern folk artists. The daughter of a wealthy Montgomery real estate agent, Anton Haardt earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and was starting her own career as a painter in 1969 when she saw Tolliver's paintings outside his house. Tolliver had been crippled several years earlier in an accident on the job at a Montgomery furniture store when a crate of marble fell from a fork lift, crushing his left ankle and destroying the muscles and tendons in his legs. Forced to use a wheelchair and crutches, he threw himself into painting "to keep [my] head together," he said later.
Haardt began buying pictures from Tolliver. "Mose didn't have much in his bank account," she says. He would sell paintings to her for $10 each. She would drive to New Orleans and sell them to Russell Gaspardi, who had a gallery in the Quarter, for $20 each. "Gaspari would sell them for $75 a piece," she says. "I'd give all the money from the sales to Mose, and he would give me two paintings in return."
Tolliver's imagination had a vivid erotic streak in his bulbous female figures, which would hardly have endeared him to Sister Gertrude. He also generated a stream of self-portraits -- a man with walking sticks, and heads that resemble animist masks.
. "Mose and I became very close friends," continues Haardt. "I was also doing a lot of traveling back then. I didn't want him to lose anything on my account." Others, including Gaspardi, began making trips to Montgomery to buy art from Mose T at his home.
The friendship that blossomed between Anton Haardt, a daughter of Alabama's upper crust, and Mose Tolliver, a black man in a wheel chair barely scraping by, typifies the way in which many self-taught painters found their way into the art market. Haardt kept buying and selling his works as an agent on a non-exclusive basis. "I love Mose. I wanted to help him," she says.
In 1982, Haardt arranged for Tolliver to show his works in Washington, D.C., at the prestigious Corcoran Museum of Art's landmark exhibit Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980.
"Before we left Alabama I had made a bet with Mose that if we bought ten of his paintings to Washington, I could sell them for a lot more money than he could ever imagine," she writes. "I aimed to sell them for one hundred dollars each, a lot of money in 1982, and certainly more than their usual selling price. After the opening, I was accompanied to my hotel room by several prominent folk-art collectors who were interested in buying Mose's paintings. Within minutes I had sold all of Mose's pictures and had one thousand dollars cash in my hand. For me, delivering those earnings to Mose was the pinnacle of our trip."
Over time, as Haardt bought more paintings from Tolliver, she held on to many of them. "I probably have 400 pieces by Mose," she says. She also purchased dozens of works by Jimmy Lee Sudduth, a rural artist whose figurative paintings, using red-brown Alabama mud, radiate a warm lyricism.
The other artist whose work Haardt championed, the late Juanita Rodgers, lived outside of Montgomery in a shack in an open field. For years, Rodgers made sculptures out of mud. Haardt befriended her as well, spending long stretches watching her work and interviewing her about her obsession with mud sculptures. Haardt is completing a book about Rodgers, whose works she has preserved in storage since Rodgers' death.
ANTON HAARDT'S ESSAY on Juanita Rodgers appears in the massive 2000 book Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art. At $100 a copy, Souls Grown Deep was the brainchild of William Arnett, a pioneering folk art dealer in Atlanta, and his son Paul Arnett. The Arnetts produced a second volume of Souls Grown Deep in 2001 with financial support from Jane Fonda, who settled in Atlanta after her divorce from CNN founder Ted Turner.
Gallery doors swing wide as New Orleans falls for art! It may be the annual defining moment for the visual arts in New Orleans. Galleries throughout the city join forces in one massive art opening known as Art for Art’s Sake. Please join us!
TORNADO SAFE ROOM - ANTON HAARDT
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Published in Brooklyn Rail a publication for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond
" In The Anton Haardt Gallery, there were paintings everywhere.There must have been at least another 40 Tollivers in the gallery. There were flower drawings by Sybil Gibson and weird dancing drawings by Thornton Dial. There were paintings by Mose’s daughter, Annie Tolliver, that looked kind of like Mose’s only a little more refined. There were Central American retablos paintings and handmade musical instruments. There were stacks of portraits by Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who put sugar in black mud and painted on wood. In the back were sculptures by Juanita Rogers made from mud and bone. I’m not sure sculpture is the right word for Rogers’s work. They look like space aliens that got run over and freeze dried and should have died but sit around lumpily on the floor instead. There was a small colored pencil drawing by Dilmas Hall about a shoe that got caught in a hurricane and dragged halfway across the country and wound up on his front lawn. The walls were covered with art and sculptures. Them was one by ‘Son’ Ford Thomas ,who was a blues guitarist who worked in a graveyard and made sculptures that look like parts of dead people.
‘Son’ Thomas was a part of the generation, now almost gone. These artists mostly didn’t start making art until they were into mid or late life or until they were injured so badly they couldn’t do anything else. Art was a way to survive despite hard times or an expression of a feeling about the world after having been around long enough to have seen part of it. That’s what the blues is about. Blues teaches repetition and variation on very simple rhythms. It’s not the newness of the song, but how you play it that matters. The songs are almost always old. Some blues players wreck the songs intentionally by playing or singing out of key. ‘Son’ House did that. This lessens the mind’s grip on the music and the emotion flows and is freed to enter the world through things instead of through language. I imagine that’s how ‘Son’ Thomas wound up making sculpture from looking at dead people.
Maybe that’s why Mose Tolliver made paintings and hung them in trees in front of his house after his legs were crushed in an accident at work. Maybe Picasso felt the same thing and that’s why he spent so much time unlearning everything he’d learned, leaving behind the things he invented and destroying what he’d made."
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