Thornton Dial

I`m learning more about how white people think,” Thornton Dial is saying kindly.”  All my life I went to the fields and I went to the plant, and white folks own everything in the United States and Negroes made everything in the United States, and they never owned too much.  Negroes have a harder time than anybody in the world, and they have less.”

Thornton Dial is a kind man, a gentle man. He has lived most of his life in and around Bessemer, Ala.  For many years Dial was a steel worker with Pullman Standard Co. making railroad sleeping cars.  But in 1987, the year he turned 59, he began making Tour-De-Force paintings so feral in their wrath, so exuberant in their invention, so monumental, playful, profound and technically proficient, that they were the subject of two concurrent exhibitions in New York.   “Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger”, The Museum of American Folk Art, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art.

The strength of Dials Art lies in its singularity, the purity of its voice from the other side rage and mourning. “If everything Dial was saying was fully known, he couldn`t get no show!” writes Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones).  His art is an expierience and learning you that cannot be taught in any other way.  The high, low folk, outsider labels get to be beside the point.