Thornton Dial (1928-2016)

Born in Emelle, Alabama, Thornton Dial worked for thirty years as a railroad welder for the Pullman Standard Company before he began making art. Coming of age amidst the most consequential episodes in twentieth-century African American history made Dial and his work inseparable from the strengths, suffering and experiences he witnessed and which his art depicts. Strongly influenced by his personal journey, this work illustrates Dial’s youth coinciding with the struggling rural farming communities during the Great Depression. Fashioned from worn clothing, tin, oil and spray paint, Dial creates a black, textured surface mimicking scorched earth, barren of any signs of prosperity.
Dial’s use of multi-layered narrative is one of the many compelling elements prominently featured here and throughout his greater body of work. His art is held in many important museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.