William Tolliver
American, 1951-2000
William Tolliver, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1951, showed an early inclination for art that his mother always met with enthusiasm. Ella Mae Tolliver worked full time in a family of tenant farmers while caring for 14 children, but actively encouraged his talents by conducting drawing contests between the children and borrowing art books from the library. These books introduced him to European masters such as Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Rubens.
Bypassing the lack of art education in his public school, Tolliver learned how to mix and blend colors using dime-store watercolor sets purchased with his earnings from mowing lawns. According to an interview with Galerie Royale in New Orleans, he learned to make academically correct paintings at a young age by completing paint-by-number kits. “There is no better teacher,” he claims. “Everything is diagrammed, every little spot, every color. Once I did one or two of those, I understood the principles.” One could speculate that the nature of paint-by-numbers, accompanied by an academic understanding of modern art history, could have influenced his later cubist-style works that featured stark outlines and strategic fields of color.
Some key moments in William Tolliver’s career, per MutualArt: “At fourteen, he dropped out to join the Job Corps in Los Angeles, training in carpentry under a visual artist mentor, before assisting a sculptor in Milwaukee—experiences that deepened his resolve upon returning to Vicksburg for construction work and nocturnal painting. […]
Tolliver married Debrah in 1977, and the couple welcomed a daughter as he pursued construction amid the late 1970s economic shifts. In 1981, chasing Louisiana's oil boom, they relocated to Lafayette, where he worked as a wallpaper hanger and house painter until the 1983 industry collapse left him unemployed, mirroring the broader Rust Belt-style downturn gripping energy-dependent regions. Turning to his daughter's paint kit for solace, he produced nine Cajun landscapes that Debrah boldly submitted to Lafayette's Live Oak Gallery, selling out in ten days and igniting his pivot to full-time art. By 1989, the family advanced to New Orleans' Galerie Royale in the French Quarter; in 1991, they settled in Atlanta's Buckhead, operating their own African American art gallery until 1997. Tolliver designed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics promotional poster amid the city's global spotlight, before his death on September 1, 2000, in Louisville, Kentucky, at age forty-eight. These personal turns unfolded against the post-Civil Rights South's rural persistence and urban migrations, framing his chronicle of Black labor without overt political inflection.”
