Thornton Dial, Sr. (American, b. 1928)

Dial has received more critical attention from the mainstream art world than other artists in the exhibition. Born to a single mother in the Deep South, he received little schooling and worked from a young age to help support his family. As a teenager he worked alternately as a bricklayer, house painter, cement mixer, and an ironworker. He eventually settled into a job at a factory building railroad boxcars, his occupation for the next thirty years until his retirement in 1983 at the age of fifty-five. Dial continued working with steel from his home, constructing patio and lawn furniture. Freed from the restrictions of the assembly line, Dial’s work in steel took on an expressive and deeply personal quality, his skills finding new application in the construction of found-object furniture and sculptural assemblages. In 1987 he met Atlanta folk art dealer William Arnett who encouraged him to explore different media and methods of working and to make his work available to those outside his immediate circle of family and friends.

Dial’s subject matter often addresses the nurturing force and creative power of women, paying tender homage to those who cared for him as a child. Like many self-taught artists he fills his compositions to the edges and presents his subjects at close range in an extremely foreshortened space. This has the effect of heightening the intensity and frenetic energy of his brushstrokes, and the flatness of the figures. It is perhaps these echoes of modernism that account for Dial’s acceptance into the mainstream and recognition as one of the masters of the margins.