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Pure Paint:
A Grand Retrospective of Montgomery’s Mose T

January 26 - March 15, 2008

Last summer the National Center for Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture at Alabama State University presented an exhibition of selected works by Mose Tolliver. It was this exhibition that served as the basis and inspiration for our current show.

Tolliver was born into a sharecropper’s family southeast of Montgomery on July 4, 1924. Injured in a work related accident in the late 1960s, he was encouraged to take up painting as he recovered. By the early 1970s, he found painting to be his true expressive outlet and, by 1981, he was honored with a solo exhibition at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, followed the next year with his inclusion in the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C. exhibition “Black Folk Art in America 1930- 1980.” His career ended with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in 2003. Tolliver died on October 30, 2006 at the age of 83.

We are indebted to all of the collectors who have made this exhibition possible: Judge and Mrs. Mark Kennedy, John Goodwin Gallion and Micki Beth Stiller who also has served as our exhibition advisor. It is enlightening and a real pleasure to discover the animated and vivid nature of this man’s art as seen in his exploration of birds, animals, trees, flowers, watermelons, buses and other modes of transportation. But most revealing are the depictions of people drawn from his life, from his understanding of history, from popular culture and from his personal mythology. As a self taught artist, Mose T invented a most captivating and delightful world that will continue to entrance and enchant those who take the time to investigate it.