Drawing from history and autobiography, self-taught artist Thornton Dial combined mass-produced objects, industrial scraps, and organic matter in complex paintings, assemblages, and wall reliefs exploring Black struggle in the American South. Before he was plucked from relative obscurity in the 1980s, Dial was employed as a metalworker in a railcar factory. In his spare time, he made large-scale sculptures from whatever materials he could scavenge—torn clothes, wire, tin, or okra roots, for instance. He often recycled old works to create new ones. Dial’s raw, expressionistic brushwork, which embraced both abstract and figurative elements, has earned him comparisons to Jackson Pollock, Anselm Kiefer, and Willem de Kooning. His work has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum, among many other institutions, and belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
