Tillage tells the story of his life as the son of
a southern sharecropper, who was killed by the KKK, and of the changes brought about by the civil rights movement.
His paintings in museum collections include Self - Portrait (1935),
Sharecropper (1937), and On the Ranch (1941) at the Dallas Museum of Art; Where the Mountain Meets the Plains, at
Southern Methodist University; and Oil Field Girls (1940), at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin.