Self-Portrait

Description

Annie Tolliver
United States, born 1950
Self-Portrait
after 1990
Oil on plywood
Mose Tolliver
United States, circa 1920–2006
Self-Portrait
late 20th century
Mixed media and house paint on plywood
Gifts of the Daniel and Harriet Fusfeld Folk Art Collection, 2002/1.192 and 1.193
Mose Tolliver began painting with house paints after a work accident left him with long hours to spend at home. After years of selling paintings from his front yard, he was eventually “discovered” when he participated in the 1982 Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980 in Washington, DC.
Mose’s daughter Annie started painting to help her father when he became so popular that he couldn’t paint fast enough. She now paints independently, in a more detailed style than her father.
(Out of the Ordinary, 2010)
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Annie Tollivar is the daughter of the well-known artist Mose Tollivar. Because her work utilizes similar compositional format and figural depictions, Mose Tollivar often signed Annie’s work and sold it as his. With the encouragement of an art dealer and her father’s permission, Annie Tollivar began signing her own work in 1990.
Annie Tollivar creates bright and light-hearted images that depict scenes designed to make the viewer smile. As in her father’s self-portraits, there is no background and the figure appears flat. Despite the lack of background in Annie Tollivar’s work, it is more detailed than her father’s. In Self-Portrait, Tollivar depicts such details as tiny white teeth and decoratively polished fingernails, elements that would not appear in her father’s work.
Lindsay Meehan
Modern and Contemporary Art Intern
2002