Thornton Dial

The “discovery” of Thornton Dial’s work in the 1980s has often been retold. Growing up in rural Alabama and beginning full-time farm work at age five, Dial spent most of his life working in heavy industry-building highways, houses and railcars. Widely considered as of the most revered self-taught artists of the past century, Dial was an extraordinarily prolific maker of assemblage sculptures from childhood on. Using industrial and organic scrap materials, he built what he considered as “things”. It was only late in life, when Atlanta collector William Arnett brought his work to prominence, that he learned that others viewed this as art. With a raw, gestural aesthetic, and containing both abstract patterns and figurative forms, Dial's work demonstrates the ambition and intellectual reach reminiscent of many modern and contemporary masters. 

"Dial's life is inseparable from history because he had made it his business as an artist to be a historian,” John Beardsley has written “Dial lived history, then he represented it in paintings and sculptures". Using the overlooked and under-considered material artifacts of everyday American life, Dial addresses American sociopolitical exigencies such as war, racism, bigotry and homelessness. Though initially heralded within the framework of “outsider art”, in recent years Dial’s far-reaching legacy has been acknowledged. In a 2011 Time Magazine profile, art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo argued that Dial's work should not be pigeon-holed into the narrowly-defined categories: “Dial's work has sometimes been described as ‘outsider art’... 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.”