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MOSE T FROM A TO Z: THE FOLK ART OF MOSE TOLLIVER BY ANTON HAARDT $46. plus shipping
Mose Tolliver, born in 1915 near Pintala,
Alabama, now lives in Montgomery. During the late 1960's, boredom and long hours of idle time spawned his creativity. Mose
works with "pure house paint" on plywood; creating whimsical, haunting and sometimes erotic pictures of wonderfully
balanced animals, humans, and flora. A "Quail Bird" may glide over a cotton field, or a spread-leg "Diana"
may be straddled over "An Excercise Rack Bicycle. Self portraits with crutches are a repeated image.
Mose
is dyslexic, which may have encouraged his artisitic efforts by limiting his reading and writing abilities. He will often
turn his paintings upside-down and paint the picture of perhaps an animal and landscape positioned from various directions.
Tolliver's titles exhibit a fantastic imagination; "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 Art, and the Cocoran Gallery of Art. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of American
Folk Art in New York City.
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MOSE T. A TO Z: THE FOLK ART OF MOSE TOLLIVER BY ANTON
HAARDT
In the winter of 1982, the American art world was jolted by a controversial exhibition
held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The morning after the opening reception, art editors questioned
in newspapers across the country, "Is this art?" That artist is the subject of a new book by Montgomery native
Anton Haardt, entitled Mose T. from A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver
"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. A to Z: The Folk Art of Mose Tolliver, a 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." JASON BERRY AUTHOR
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