Collection Highlights: Mose Tolliver

For the first time, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center presents select paintings from its collection of works by Mose Tolliver, many of which date from before 1982. The Arts Center acquired thirty-four Tolliver works in 2018 from Christy Brandt with the assistance of the Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Mose Tolliver (1924–2006) created a vast oeuvre of bright, graphic, and playful depictions of fruit, snakes, animals, landscapes, and people. He used house paint applied to a variety of surfaces including cabinet fronts, plywood, furniture, and fiberboard. Born on July 4, 1924, to a sharecropping family outside of Montgomery, AL, Tolliver grew up painting on tree trunks, roots, and deer hides. At the outset of the Great Depression, Tolliver moved into Montgomery and took on odd jobs to support his wife, Willie Mae, and their family of eleven children. In the late 1960s, while he was working at McLendon’s Furniture Company, a load of marble fell off a forklift and crushed both his legs, prohibiting him from walking without the assistance of two canes or a walker.

Unable to continue working, Tolliver returned to art-making full time. He painted prodigiously, often producing up to ten works in a day, displaying and selling them on his front porch as they were produced. His chosen subjects vacillated between observations of the neighborhood around him, recollections of his rural upbringing, studies of the natural world he loved so much, and portraits of celebrities and friends. Tolliver’s work became widely collected after he was featured in the groundbreaking 1982 show Black Folk Art in America 1920-1980 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.