12/01/2025
Im excited to have this piece by Mose T in the shop! Mose Tolliver (Mose T, with the famous backward “s”) was a self-taught folk artist from Pike Road, Alabama, born to a sharecropping family and schooled only through the third grade. After a devastating factory accident in the late 1960s crushed his legs, he turned more fully to painting as a way to cope with pain and long hours at home. Working mostly from a chair or his bed in Montgomery, he painted on whatever he could find—plywood, door panels, table tops—using plain house paint and his own vivid imagination.
Tolliver’s style is instantly recognizable: flat, frontal figures and animals, birds, watermelons, and sometimes playful or erotic scenes that feel both simple and deeply personal. Considered one of the most important Southern “outsider” artists, his work has been exhibited by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and appears in major museum collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and others.
