Thornton Dial, Sr.

About the artist

Born in 1928, lives and works in and around Bessemer, Alabama

One of the most widely exhibited and collected contemporary artists associated with American self-taught and vernacular art, Thornton Dial, Sr. has lived much of his life in and around Bessemer, Alabama. He worked as a manual laborer in a variety of positions—as carpenter, bricklayer, house painter, and concrete worker––but spent thirty years as a railroad welder for Pullman Standard, an experience which informed his later large-scale steel sculpture. Dial has always made what he calls “things,” but only upon his retirement in the late 1980s did he begin to concentrate exclusively on his art (his son Thornton, Jr., is also an accomplished artist).
            Perhaps the most identifiable quality to Dial’s work is its astonishing mutability in form and diversity in media. Although singular in style and easily recognizable, his remarkably varied practice encompasses a multiplicity of modes, and as a result his mercurial aesthetic seems most comfortably situated in dense multimedia works, the found-object assemblages and painted sculptural reliefs that emerged later in his career. Portraiture, animal figuration, and abstraction all offer recurring motifs amid evocatively titled metaphorical works that range from intimate works on paper to allegorical paintings rendered in thick impasto to heroically-scaled welded sculpture. Following in the tradition of modernist semi-abstraction, Dial’s poetic paintings and assemblages, with their heavily accreted surfaces and swirling gestural effects, show a kinship to German Neo-Expressionism and even American Abstract Expressionism. An emphatic interest in newsworthy subject matter, the deeply felt pain of American race relations, and romantic love suffuse his canvasses and sculptures with a lyrical sense of empathy and embrace.
            Through the efforts of collector and curator Bill Arnett, his powerful—and often topical—multimedia work quickly garnered critical acclaim over the next decade, with solo shows at the American Folk Art Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art; a slot in the 2000 Whitney Biennial; and pieces in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Atlanta’s High Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

—Brendan Greaves

Bibliography

Arnett, William, and Paul Arnett, eds. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.

Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways through the Black Atlantic South. New York: Intar Latin American Gallery, 1988.

Ashe: Improvisation & Recycling in African-American Visionary Art. Winston-Salem, NC: Winston-Salem State University/Diggs Gallery, 1993.

Black History and Artistry: Work by Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors from the Blanchard-Hill Collection. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1993.

Borum, Jenifer P. “Strategy of the Tiger: The World of Thornton Dial.” Folk Art 18, no. 4 (Winter 1993/1994): 34-40. 

Celebrating the Vision: Self-Taught Artists of Alabama. Talladega, AL: Jemison-Carnegie Heritage Hall, 2000.

Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence. Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum, 1992.

Fearful Symmetry: The Tiger Cat in the Art of Thorton Dial. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

Flying Free: Twentieth Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin And Baron Gordon. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997.

The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art. San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Museum of Art, 1994.

Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. “Going Urban: American Folk Art and the Great Migration,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 26-51.

McEvilley, Thomas. “The Missing Tradition.” Art in America (May 1997): 78-85.

Perry, Regenia A. “Contemporary African American Folk Art in America: An Overview.” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 1 (1993): 4-30. 

Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.

Simpson, Milton. Folk Erotica: Celebrating Centuries of Erotic Americana. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

Thornton Dial: Strategy of the World. Jamaica, NY: Southern Queens Park Association, 1990.

Thornton Dial: The Tiger Looking In. Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1997.

Tully, Judd. “Outside, Inside, or Somewhere In-Between?” Art News (May 1996): 118-121.

Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.