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In memory of Mose Tolliver

Dimly, I came to art, and utterly without training. That may, in the end, explain how I came to be sympathetic to untrained artists, though, as Mark Lanegan long ago reminded me, "it's all punk rock." Only I think he said it better.
It started here: A couple of times in my late teens father arranged for me to travel, sort of with him, to Chicago and New York. His only requirement was that I visit one of the major art museums in each city. Later, when I quit a pretty good job (and not a moment before I'd worn out my welcome) to open Vox Populi Gallery in Seattle, in collaboration with a fellow named Carl Carlson, I reminded dad that it was his fault.
Or at least something he'd stirred up.
Mother lined the stairwell with drawings from some of her architecture classes at Berkeley in the early 1950s, but I have none of her talent.
Somewhere in a roll is a poster of El Greco's "View of Toledo" that I brought back from Chicago, that summer of 1976, though I rarely hung it because the colors were too pale an imitation of the original.
During my grade school years, when I collected stamps (and what do you do with such a collection now?), I was perplexed by Grandma Moses and the whole idea of untrained art. I suspect she merited a spread in Life or National Geographic when I was a kid, though she died in 1961 and so I cannot have seen the Life magazine which put her on the cover when she turned 100.
Years later the woman with whom I kept company decided we should go to the art fair being held in the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Seattle. I do not remember having been excited by the prospect, but, nevertheless, I bought a piece by an Atlanta artist named Derrick Minter, an illustration for a children's book that features a black preacher and a snake, carved out of common pine. It was not quite folk art -- he was an art school grad apparently oblivious to the tradition his work echoed -- and I can remember looking at Leroy Alman's carving at the Mia Gallery's stall, and wishing my Christmas bonus had been that much. I cannot remember whether Mia carried Mose Tolliver, or not, nor where I first heard of him. I know that for some time I misunderstood his name, signed Moset in somewhat dyslexic characters, to be pronounced "moze-ay," and so declaimed my ignorance for all to hear.
Somewhere in all that I caught on to Howard Finster, probably because of his cover art for the Talking Heads. Jeff Suhey, who during his time at A&M signed the Ass Ponys and 16 Horsepower, and with whom I might have ended up friends had I stayed in LA (last I heard Jeff was buying and renovating houses with his father), was once kind enough to pick up a couple pieces from Paradise Garden and send them to me, long before Finster's work was worth what it is today.
At some point before Vox Populi was even a glimmer local TV profiled two African-American executives -- bankers, I believe -- who had quit their corporate jobs to open an art gallery. Somehow that story, and the fact that the brother of one of my co-workers was one of the great underground LA poster artists (POG, he signed his posters, but nobody really knows about him anymore) emboldened me to think I should open a gallery, though I had never been inside one before I built Vox Pop.
I went to the African-American gallery a few times, and found them oddly unfriendly. It could have been that I was the wrong color for that neighborhood, or that I didn't dress the part of a buyer (as, in fact, I was not), or that they viewed me as competition. They had some of Mose Tolliver's pieces on their walls, and I remember that they wanted something like $1200 for them, which either meant they didn't wish to sell or that they'd paid far too much.
One of the rites of passage for folk art collectors is driving through remote parts of the American South and buying directly from the artists. Many of whom are poor, and remain so, despite the collectibility of their work (if R.A. Miller had received a fraction of what his Blow Oskars now sell for, at least his dogs would have eaten better, if not his kin; and his cataracts might have been fixed sooner). I'm a kid from the suburbs of Seattle, and have seen very little real poverty. Smelled less of it. I talked Carl into letting me spend some of our limited start-up money to fly to the South and buy art for Vox Populi. In retrospect, I'd have done better financially had I simply spent what I had on things I like and kept them, rather than going into the gallery business, but we had fun and I hope some of the folks who bought Finster and Miller and other pieces from us for what now seems a song,well, I hope they remember Vox Pop fondly.
So I began at Paradise Garden, where I ran into Michael Finster, and his father, Roy. Michael has the talent, though we had trouble selling his art. It's still among my favorite work hanging in our home, and makes a nice transition from unconscious to conscious outsider art. He quit painting for a while, but every once in a while I see dribbles of new work on the internet when I search for him. And then drove to Tubby Brown's place, and RA Miller's, and then off to search for Leroy Alman and Jimmy Lee Suddeth with bad directions that never worked, and thence toward Montgomery, Alabama, where Mose Tolliver worked with his daughter, Annie.
Mose had been crippled in a warehouse accident, and his employer had given him a bunch of housepaint by way of...I don't know...guilt, maybe. Rehabilitation? Something. He hung his paintings outside his house, and, eventually, white people who collected such things started buying them. In time his children caught the habit, and it is now difficult to be certain that paintings he signed came from his brush.
I had been told of an antique shop in Prattville, Alabama (at least as I remember it today), and stopped there first. The proprietress had hung a folk art show there a while before, and had lots of pieces left over, including a trove of Mose and Annie Tolliver's work. I bought everything I could afford and could pack, and discovered the really fabulous work of Calvin Livingston. She had a van Mose had painted that could have been mine for $5,000, and some days I wish I'd had the money. I hope somebody saved it from rot, anyhow. She also had a couple huge pieces by Livingston that I simply could not figure out how to get home, save for buying the Tolliver van and driving them, and I was pretty certain it wouldn't make it from Prattville, Alabama, to Seattle, Washington.
So that's where I bought most of the Mose Tolliver pieces we sold, and didn't sell, the ones that hang on our living room wall, save for one older piece that came through the gallery doors as part of a collection.
Somehow I was warned off visiting Tolliver. I didn't have a native guide, and he lived in a bad neighborhood, and some of his kids were a little rough. I think I turned back, too, because the Talladega 500 was that weekend, and I feared stock car traffic.
Anyhow, this morning, dancing around the internet for a spare moment, I ran onto a mention on the Yard Dog website that Mose Tolliver had passed away October 30. Which means, I suppose, that the paintings he signed are worth more than they were on October 29, but that's not the point.
At least I don't think that's the point.
We have a long ladder which I am sometimes obliged to climb. Because I do not handle heights well, I have found that there is a step beyond which I simply cannot go. That is as close as I can come to explaining why I didn't visit Mose T, nor Jimmy Suddeth. (All these people, save Michael Finster and Calvin Livingston, are now gone, and I wonder whether the tradition they so inadvertently nurtured will survive the next generation.) Finances and schedule will answer why I never went back (save to Paradise Garden, which crumbled into...family chaos, I guess, and was near enough to Atlanta to be on the way home occasionally).
There is a social component to buying directly from the artist that I have yet to master. They seek, I think, a kind of validation from we who are not at all like the, and yet respond to their work. And there's an element of hustle, of conning the unknowing affluent in to paying for something they don't value. Plus there's a rich history of predatory art dealers, which leads to various kinds of misunderstandings and complex trust issues. I remember one dealer who bought everything RA Miller had done that morning (that is, everything save the ten or twelve pieces I'd picked out), whether she liked it or not, because she knew she could sell it wherever up north her gallery was. And because if she bought it nobody else could. I felt badly for the collectors who arrived that Saturday afternoon to find his shelves bare, though he worked quickly and maybe they didn't stay bare for long.
I didn't want to be one of those people. I didn't wish to exploit artists. I didn't wish to be a tourist in a crack neighborhood, didn't know how to drive to Mose Tolliver's house and not play that role.
He was 82 when he died, though his birth date is rendered in several ways, and that, too, may be wrong.

Posted by grant on November 26, 2006 10:40 AM | Permalink

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