Gallery
owner Anton Haardt's admiration of Mose T's talent led to both a long
friendship and working relationship and a book of Mose T's works. 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. From 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. In 1969
Haardt began buying pictures from Tolliver. She would drive to New Orleans and sell them for $20. to Gaspari, who had a gallery in the Quarter. "Gaspari
would sell them for $75 a piece," she says. "I'd give all the money
from the sales to Mose, and he would give me two paintings in return."In
1982, his works were displayed in
Washington, D.C., at the prestigious Corcoran Museum of Art's landmark exhibit
Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980. --Jason Berry, Gambit
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