Thornton Dial ~ Much More Than Outsider Art ~ Retrospective At The Indianapolis Museum of Art

Written by Mary Lee Pappas Sunday, 29 April 2012 21:51

Indianapolis (The Indianapolis Star). - It's not every day that a self-taught, ‘outsider’ artist finds their work on the walls of fine art museums throughout the country. But Thornton Dial isn't your typical outsider artist. The 82-year-old Dial didn't actually begin making art until retirement age, years after working in the industrial town of Bessemer, Alabama, as a welder, carpenter, bricklayer and cement worker. It's those same trades that Dial uses to create his large-scale works of art. Collected by celebrities, including Jane Fonda, and art aficionados alike, Dial's work can be found inside institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Now the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is preparing an exhibit of Dial's work, opening "Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial" on Friday. Seventy-five artworks comprise the exhibit, 25 of which haven't been exhibited before, but then much of his work has never been seen. On view at IMA until 18 September, 2011.

This is only Dial's third major museum exhibit in more than 20 years, though he's been featured in varied museum surveys and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. "He was born into dire poverty in the rural south in 1928, as the story goes, literally in a corn field," said Joanne Cubbs, Indianapolis Museum of Art's adjunct curator of American Art, about Dial. "His life is one that most would define as riddled with incredible hardship."

At age 13, Dial left his sharecropping roots in Emelle, Alabama, to work in Bessemer , a town right outside of Birmingham, where he still resides and spent most of his time working for the Pullman Co.

As an artist, he was discovered in the mid-1980s by Georgia art dealer William Arnett. His work came into prominence in the context of folk or outsider art, problematic parameters because those definitions or categories had little to do with the work itself, "and more to do with those who have the power to define what art is," said Cubbs. "Those terms that have been used to define (him) in the past don't illuminate much. In this exhibition, we're showing the work of a powerful contemporary artist."

However, Dial's rise to prominence has not been without controversy. In 1993, during a "60 Minutes" segment, host Morley Safer portrayed Dial as an uneducated artist being exploited by rich white interests. The televised report, according to IMA CEO Maxwell Anderson, "expressed incredulity that an African-American without a formal education could make something of value to the art world." "That penniless jazz musicians from the same part of the United States could also make masterworks seems not to have occurred to Safer," Anderson said.

Although not formally trained as an artist in the usual sense, Dial draws inspiration from little-known and unheralded expressive traditions of the African-American South, including the historical precedent of simply making do. A fundamental characteristic of Dial's work is his use of found objects.




"Kind of like the kitchen sink. All manner of industrial and popular debris," Cubbs said of the old clothes, carpet, rope, bed coils, Christmas tree lights and ornaments, mannequin parts, dolls, stuffed animals, toys, funerary flowers, wigs, ceramic figurines, bottles and other refuge all aesthetically assembled into Dial's dizzyingly heavily textured creations.

"The castaway objects he uses for their resonate symbolism, just not for the sake of using materials. They're all signs and have complex imbedded meaning especially when they start to converse with each other," she said. This draws from allegorical displays known as the African-American yard show appearing in the South's cultural topography for more than 100 years.

"It's a form of encoded visual language that expresses a wide range of social, political, spiritual, philosophical ideas," Cubbs said. "Through much of that history, African-American aesthetic expressions had to be created secretly or surreptitiously to avoid discovery and destruction first by the brutal forces of black enslavement and later by the suppression of a dominant white over-culture, so a number of covert visual languages developed in response to that tyranny."

Dial's art provides metaphors, an unflinching look at the nature of humanity and history, for the plight of all those who suffer oppression, and for the dispossessed in the world.

"As a working-class black man struggling through one of the most repressive and perilous periods of race relations in our history, he emerged from these experiences not embittered or defeated like most of us would have, but offering a kind of new and probing discourse on history," said Cubbs.

Dial still has something to say. He continues to paint in his hometown, though he's suffered a mild stroke and congestive heart failure. "But despite these difficulties, he has continued to do major work" said Cubbs. "He presents us with a unique merging of aesthetics, history and social conscience that stirs our imagination, inspires our humanity."

Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) at : www.imamuseum.org/

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