On Monday, the great American artist Thornton Dial died at age 87. Dial leaves behind a prolific career of painting, drawing, and assemblage that continues to tell a history of black life during the years in which he worked. The work represents moments that Thornton’s career captured of black southern life; the lives of those who resisted the calls of the Great Migration and remained rural. The sonorous stories of northern freedom are hard to see in Dial’s oeuvre. Yet now, vivid southern black stories are part of the great American visual narrative—and the collections of MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art—specifically because the artist stayed at home.

 

Dial was born in 1928 in Emelle, Alabama. He grew up on a former cotton plantation and learned how to sculpt with the things around him from relatives. Employing everyday materials he found became a lasting characteristic of his self-taught practice. In Factory Night Sky, Dial uses shattered glass, and wire on a painted panel. The work is reflective of Dial’s life working as a laborer in factories in Alabama. “When I start any piece of art I can pick up anything I want to pick up. When I get ready for that, I already got my idea for it,” Dial once reflected upon his process, which has been compared to that of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. The sculpture Lost Cows, comprised of cow skeletons, steel, golf bags, and mirrors recalls his life early life growing up in a family of sharecroppers.

 

The politics of the moment also often influenced his vision. The drawing, 9/11: Interrupting The Morning News, comments on the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The red, white, and blue New Veteran’s Day and Everybody Loves the United States continue the artist’s exploration of an America between freedom and tragedy. And Don’t Matter How Raggly The Flag, IT Still Got To Tie Us Together depicts an American flag, recognizably tattered, that seems to represent an understanding of the realities of American history and the promise of a future defined by a redemptive hope.

 

The work also greatly pierced the personal. “My art is the evidence of my freedom,” Dial said in an interview with the Souls Grown Deep foundation. Throughout his career, he relentlessly drew pictures of black men and women, oddly shaped, but visible and standing together. The portraits seemed to represent the legacy of slavery and injustice that plagued black life in America and especially the Deep South. In The Last Day Of Martin Luther King the artist abstractly comments on how white terror informed a survival of southern black life. The cloth, cotton batting, burlap, and sheet metal of Shadows of the Field note how Dial’s work functions to create a landscape of the American south that speaks to the forgotten materiality of black life there.

 

The 1993 exhibition Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger, shown at The New Museum and Museum of American Folk Art, helped Dial gain relevancy in the institutional art world. And it was the 2005 solo show, Thornton Dial In the 21st Century, and 2011 traveling retrospective, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, that brought the artist greater visibility. Yet in remembering the prolific career of Dial, what should not be forgotten is the lack of opportunity that defined the artist as an “outsider.” He was an American genius as many have lauded in his passing, but it was a brilliance long undervalued. The artist himself only came to see his work as art late in his life. Dial was well into his 50s before he exhibited the work that would become so consequential in the way in which the black American south of the 20th century is remembered. What does it mean that someone as gifted as Dial couldn’t see himself within the definitions of the art of his time?

“A quiet revolution may indeed be in process,” wrote curator Lowery Stokes Sims in the Image of the Tiger exhibition brochure. Sims correctly noted in 1993 that Dial’s work would unearth “a revolution that may very well effect a reexamination and reconsideration of the centrality of the ‘outsider’ experience to mainstream art experience, namely the black experience to that of the American experience.”

Thornton Dial’s work built a tapestry of tenacity that redefined the stories that art allows itself to tell.  

 

For more information on Thornton Dial’s career, click here.

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