Thornton Dial
I, Too, Am Thornton Dial
LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA
The LSU Museum of Art is thrilled to announce I, Too, Am Thornton Dial. Originally curated by Paul Barrett of Birmingham, Alabama, this exhibition provides a thorough overview of work by the pivotal vernacular artist Thornton Dial. I, Too, Am Thornton Dial includes over seventy pivotal drawings, sculptures, paintings, and assemblages drawn from private and family collections.
Dial was born in 1928 to a sharecropping family in rural Alabama. His life was interwoven with poverty and tumultuous experience, having lived in the deep South through the Great Depression, Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. After dropping out of school at age twelve and working a series of odd jobs, Dial found steady employment at the Pullman Standard Plant in Bessemer, Alabama. There he honed his skills at construction and metal work, laying a foundation for his artistic endeavors. Dial began creating early on, finding bits of odd scrap and debris, and putting it together to make interesting forms that would decorate his home and yard.
When the plant shut down in 1981, Dial devoted his time to creating artwork. He drew inspiration from his life experiences, blending complex themes like Civil Rights, race, class, and family into sophisticated arrangements crafted with found objects—everything from wood, toys, metal, and clothing. His condensed assemblages, although compactly layered with commonplace fragments of life, move with a lightness, pulling the viewer in to explore the cracks and crevices of the varied surface. His aesthetic was not limited to sculptural constructions; Dial’s masterful drawings and paintings demonstrate his deft hand at composition and line, through the exploration of reoccurring motifs, often women and tigers (a symbol of himself), in swirling masses of shapes and color.
After meeting the Atlanta-based collector William Arnett in late 1980s, Dial gained national attention, with his artwork being the subject of solo exhibitions including at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2016); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (2011); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA (2011); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2005); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1993); American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY (1993); and was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York, NY (2000). Dial is represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many other museums.