One of the most highly regarded American self- taught artists began life as the son of a sharecropper and farm overseer on the Rittenour farm. Mose Tolliver was the youngest of seven sons born into the Ike Tolliver family of twelve children. He attended Mt. Olive School briefly through the third grade. "I didn't like school. I remember I wanted to be outdoors working with my older brothers or even stacking wood . . . . One thing I remember about our farm house, it was just a shack, but my Mama had pictures all over the walls."

He worked through his teen years for a truck farmer gathering and selling produce. Then after his father had died, when his mother was elderly, he moved with her into the city of Montgomery and lived in the sa...