Thornton Dial in the 21st Century
William Arnett, John Beardsley, Jane Livingston, and Alvia J. Wardlaw, curators
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005
An in-depth look at just five years of work from the early 21st century by one of the most remarkable artists to come out of the American South in recent decades. Dial, who worked most of his life in heavy industry in Bessemer, Alabama, made “things” out of salvaged materials from an early age, many of which dressed his yard.
Later in life, he became an astonishingly versatile painter and draftsman as well as a sculptor.
His paintings, often at a vast scale with complex surfaces combining paint and found objects of every conceivable kind, explored many of the most consequential episodes in 20th century African American life—sharecropping in the Black Belt, migration from country to city, the violence of the Jim Crow era, the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, and the continuing racial conundrums of contemporary America.
Dial’s life is inseparable from this history because he made it his business as an artist to be an historian. Dial lived history, then he represented it in epic, challenging, often slyly humorous or enigmatic paintings and sculptures. The exhibition was accompanied by a major publication. See exhibition catalog details here.
Images from the exhibition catalogue
