Thornton Dial (b. Emelle, AL, 1928; d. McCalla, AL, 2016) began his career as an artist in the late 1980s and was immediately heralded as a distinctive new American voice. His allegorical paintings and assemblages make daring use of color and material to address the challenges of American art and history, particularly the injustices of race and class. Dial expanded the tradition of modernist painting by experimenting with re-purposed objects and reworking the surface of each painting into a powerful sculptured relief surface. The art critic Thomas McEvilly wrote about him, "Dial has chosen to engage history in its repressed stretches, looking into the darkness where art does not usually go."
Read MoreRecent solo exhibitions include Blum & Poe (2023); David Lewis (2022, 2018); Hood Art Museum, Hanover (2022) High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2016, 2013); New Orleans Museum of Art (2012); Indianapolis Museum of Art (2011); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1993); and the American Folk Art Museum, New York (1993). Recent group exhibitions include the National Gallery, London (2023), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2020); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020); Met Breuer (2019); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2017); Birmingham Museum of Art (2017); Saint Louis Art Museum (2016); Intuit, Chicago (2016); Brooklyn Museum (2015); The StudioMuseum in Harlem, New York (2014); Museum of African American History, Detroit (2002); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2002); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1994), among many others. Dial's work is included in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Brooklyn Museum; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., among many others.
Text courtesy David Lewis.
