Thornton Dial - Assamblage & Sculpture

Thornton Dial, a self-taught artist whose paintings and assemblages fashioned from scavenged materials told the story of black struggle in the South and found their way to the permanent collections of major museums.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering African-American artist best known for his large-scale assemblage paintings. He melded complex themes like Civil Rights history, archaeology, and construction, through the use of materials like cow skeletons, American flags, and rebar. Often referred to as an “outsider artist,” Dial’s work is highly biographical. Born on September 10, 1928 in Emelle, AL, Dial's youth was filled with hardship, born into poverty on a sharecropping farm. Though he never received any formal art training, he made sculptures from found objects from a young age. Dial spent much of his life working construction for the Pullman Company, around Birmingham, AL. In 1981, he retired from welding and construction and devoted himself to his art.
"From the complex, exuberant textures of his assemblages to the deft, fluid lines of his drawings, Dial’s facility as an artist was truly extraordinary,” Sheena Wagstaff, the chairwoman of the department of modern and contemporary art at the Met, said on Monday. “He leaves us with a body of work that is a rich visual manifestation of a life history, one that witnessed a remarkable time of change in the world from the perspective of an African-American man.”(nytimes.com)

Thornton Dial - Assemblage Art

"Thornton Dial (American, 1928–2016) was a self-taught artist from Emelle, AL, known for his large-scale assemblages that address issues of racism, war, and homelessness.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering African-American artist best known for his large-scale assemblage paintings. He melded complex themes like Civil Rights history, archaeology, and construction, through the use of materials like cow skeletons, American flags, and rebar. Often referred to as an “outsider artist,” Dial’s work is highly biographical. Born on September 10, 1928 in Emelle, AL, Dial's youth was filled with hardship, born into poverty on a sharecropping farm. Though he never received any formal art training, he made sculptures from found objects from a young age. Dial spent much of his life working construction for the Pullman Company, around Birmingham, AL. In 1981, he retired from welding and construction and devoted himself to his art. In the late 1980s he came to the attention of the influential, Atlanta-based collector Bill Arnett. Arnett went on to bring Dial’s work to national prominence. Since the 1990s, Dial's work has gained cultural acclaim and recognition, leading to inclusion in several important exhibitions, including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. The artist died on January 25, 2016 in McCalla, AL. Today, his work is among the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York."( artnet )

Thornton Dial

Thornton Dial (10 September 1928 – 25 January 2016) was a pioneering African-American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. His works have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia and most recently the de Young Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ten of Mr. Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
Thornton Dial's work addresses American sociopolitical exigencies such as war, racism, bigotry and homelessness. He draws attention to these themes using the overlooked and under-considered material artifacts of everyday American life. Combining paint and found materials, Dial constructs large-scale assemblages with cast-away objects ranging from rope to bones to buckets. Works such as Black Walk and The Blood of Hard Times, for example, use corrugated tin and other dilapidated pieces of metal to refer to the destitute bodies and vernacular architecture of the rural South. Dial invokes the history of the American rural South throughout much of his work.
In 2011, Dial's work was profiled in a four-page story in Time Magazine, where art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo argued that Dial's work should not be pigeon-holed into the narrowly-defined category of "outsider art":
"Dial's work has sometimes been described as "outsider art", a term that attempts to cover the product of everyone from naive painters like Grandma Moses to institutionalized lost souls like Martín Ramírez and full-bore obsessives like Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor... But if there's one lesson to take away from "Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial," a triumphant new retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it's that Dial, 82, doesn't belong within even the broad confines of that category....What he does can be discussed as art, just art, no surplus notions of outsiderness required....And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around."Wikipedia

Thornton Dial

"Thornton Dial, (born Sept. 10, 1928, Emelle, Ala.—died Jan. 25, 2016, McCalla, Ala.), American artist who created powerfully evocative assemblages, sculptures, collages, paintings, and drawings that reflected his personal history and events in the world. Dial had little formal schooling and did farm work as a child. When he was about 12 years old, he was sent to live with a relative in Bessemer, Ala., and he engaged in a variety of work, including carpentry and house painting, as a teen. He later became a metal worker at the Pullman Standard railroad-car manufacturing plant. Throughout his adult life he created assemblages, which he called “things,” out of found and discarded objects, possibly inspired by similar pieces made and displayed in rural front yards in parts of the South. In 1987 another folk artist, Lonnie Holley, introduced Dial to the collector William Arnett, who was on a mission to find and preserve vernacular African American art. In 1990 an exhibition of Dial’s work, “Thornton Dial: Ladies of the United States,” was mounted by Kennesaw State College (now Kennesaw State University) in Marietta, Ga. Numerous solo and group exhibitions followed, notably the traveling art show “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” which started at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2011 and concluded at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2013. His notable works include the sculpture Lost Cows (2000–01), made from the bones of cattle, and Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together (2003), in which bits of fabric were assembled to take on the appearance of a flag. Collections of Dial’s works were housed in such museums as the American Folk Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C."(britannica.com)

 "In 2011, Dial's work was profiled in a four-page story in Time Magazine, where art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo argued that Dial's work belongs to the category of art and should not be pigeon-holed into narrowly defined categories:
"Dial's work has sometimes been described as "outsider art", a term that attempts to cover the product of everyone from naive painters like Grandma Moses to institutionalized lost souls like Martín Ramírez and full-bore obsessives like Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who spent a lifetime secretly producing a private fantasia of little girls in peril. But if there's one lesson to take away from "Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial," a triumphant new retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it's that Dial, 82, doesn't belong within even the broad confines of that category....What he does can be discussed as art, just art, no surplus notions of outsiderness required....And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around.

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times called Dial "preternaturally gifted," and said he looks "dumfoundingly adept to some of us because his energy and fluent line, abstracted in maelstroms of color, easily call to mind Pollock and de Kooning,"[10] while New York Times reporter Carol Kino described Dial's "work's look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew[ing] closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat."
In 1993, Dial's work was the subject of a large exhibition that was presented simultaneously at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. In 2000, the artist's work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2005-06, the Museum of Fine Art; Houston presented a major exhibition entitled "Thornton Dial in the 21st Century". Dial's works can be found in many notable public and private collections, including those of, among other institutions, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art."Wikipedia