On Thursday, my partner and I took a turn around the Indianapolis Museum of Art. There was a special exhibition there on the art of Thornton Dial entitled Hard Truths. The show was something of a revelation.
Thornton Dial is an African American metal worker from rural Alabama. Due to his having to work from a very young age, he never learned to read. Needless to say, he has never had an art lesson. On learning this, the reflex of many people will be to categorize Mr. Dial's art as "outsider art" or "folk art," or "naive art." But there is nothing naive about Dial's art. It has formal structure. It has subtlety. It has amazing depth. And, of course, it is beautiful. In my opinion, Dial is a genius.
Thornton Dial, now in his eighties, has been making art for several decades now, but he has not gotten much attention. There's a complicated history to this, though much of it can be boiled down to Dial's art being classified as "outsider art," which can in turn be boiled down to racist assumptions being applied to the art produced by an illiterate African American from rural Alabama. I don't want to get into that history. Instead, I want to focus on Dial's amazing work. With this new exhibition, I hope Dial will get the recognition he deserves.
Make the jump to see more...
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All photos of Thornton Dial's work are by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Much of Thornton Dial's work has a great deal to say on the topics of society, racism, politics, history, current events, and the various struggles for equal rights. He has created pieces dealing with slavery, lynching, discrimination (both racial and gender), 9/11, the Iraq War, natural disasters, poverty, homelessness, and more. It's very heavy stuff, and can be hard to take. For example, below is a piece entitled High and Wide: Taking the Rat to the Man. In it, he portrays a slave ship on the sea. The Mickey Mouse doll in chains represents the slave.
The use of a doll that we associate with innocence in such a brutal way is jarring. Photos simply do not do Dial's art justice. As you can guess from the doll, this work, and most of Dial's other works, are three-dimensional. The sails of the ship are curved metal sheets suspended in front of the picture plane. To fully appreciate Dial's work, one needs to be in the same room.
Here is another piece, one which I think is very beautiful:
The composition of the piece, the symmetry of the placement of the materials, the play of the different shapes against each other, all make this piece a delight to the eye, in my opinion. But then you look at the title: Who Got the Corn? Note that the corn stalks are all behind fencing, where the viewer can't get to them. This piece is about sharecropping--slavery by another name.
Another remarkable work is this one: The Last Day of Martin Luther King.
King is portrayed as a tiger. Dial often portrays African American men as tigers or other cats: creatures who can get out of a tight place and land on their feet. Above King, you see Coretta Scott King grieving, and in the upper left hand corner, you see the face of Christ. In the lower left hand corner, an assemblage of decorated pots and pans is a reference to the Last Supper.
I had originally wanted to limit myself to three of Dial's works (fair use and all), but what I've included thus far is pretty heavy stuff, and while most of Dial's work comments on difficult issues, he has also created pieces as dedications, or with spiritual themes, that leave one in a happier place. For example, here is Dial's vision of creation, entitled The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle:
Again, it's hard to see from a photograph, but the work includes many plastic toys of various animals, and plastic flowers and plants. Humanity enters in the upper left.
The last photo I will include here is, I think, appropriate to us all as Americans, and to the participants on dkos in particular: Don't Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together:
Hard Truths is currently on exhibition at the Indianapolis Art Museum. If you have a chance to see it, I would highly recommend that you do. You will see all of the works above, and many more. If you can't make it, I encourage you to visit the exhibit's website, where you can see many (though not all) the works on display, as well as view the trailer for an award winning documentary produced by Alabama Public Television entitled Mr. Dial Has Something to Say.
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