Thornton DialOfficial Estate Site

TD

A close black-and-white portrait of Thornton Dial in later life against a black ground. He wears a dark work cap and an open-collared white shirt, his face lit from one side, looking just past the camera. A photograph by Stephen Pitkin.

Photograph by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

1928 – 2016  ·  Emelle to McCalla, Alabama

He made art out of what the world threw away.

Tin, steel, rope, carpet, roots and rust — assembled into a record of Black labor, struggle, and survival in the American South. This is the official site of the Estate of Thornton Dial.

Explore the Work
Read His-Story

35

Works on view

See the art →

22

Museum collections

See where →

8

Publications

See the archive →
Thornton Dial stands in the doorway of his studio in a paint-spattered dark shirt, one hand on the frame, looking steadily at the camera. Behind him the interior is stacked with works in progress and bundled materials; the door post beside him is crusted with years of paint. A photograph by Jerry Siegel.

Photograph by Jerry Siegel

His-Story

Born to a sharecropping family in Emelle. Thirty years fabricating railcars at Pullman Standard in Bessemer.

A third-grade education, and a body of work now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the High.

Read the full story

Five Decades, Four Kinds of Work

An American flag built at wall scale out of scrap. Red and white stripes are torn strips of cloth, splayed mattress coils and rows of flattened can lids, all thick with paint and pulling loose from the surface; a blue canton sits in the top left with a dark tangled mass where the stars should be, and another knot of blue cloth hangs off the right-hand edge.
Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together
2003
Mattress coils, chicken wire, clothing, can lids, found metal, plastic twine, wire, Splash Zone compound, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood
71 × 114 × 8 in
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
An outdoor sculpture in a public park: a wide arch of welded black steel, perhaps two storeys high, built from salvaged wheels, tyres, sheet metal, ladders and curling rods, standing on a paved plaza behind a clipped hedge with mature trees rising behind it.
The Bridge — Freedom Park, Atlanta
1997
A square wall relief packed edge to edge with six-pointed starbursts cut from flattened paint cans in white, yellow, red, pink, blue and black, their lids still attached at the centres. At the middle, arms and legs flung wide across the stars, a life-size figure made of stiffened work clothes -- jacket, shirt and trousers -- with a green-grey face.
Stars of Everything
2004
Paint cans, plastic cans, spray paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood
98 × 101.5 × 20.5 in

Art is a guide for every person who is looking for something.

Thornton Dial

The Art

Swipe or use the arrows. The full gallery lives on the Art page.

A dense red field crossed by thick yellow and white bands that curve like cables or searchlights. Worked into them are dozens of small staring eyes and cartoon-like faces in black outline, so that the whole surface seems to be watching. Rope carpet and wood stand up in ridges under the paint.
Men on Alert: All Eyes on Iraq
1990
Rope carpet, wood, oil and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood
69.5 × 76 in
A freestanding sculpture, photographed against black, built from animal bones and found metal and painted entirely white. Long leg bones and vertebrae are wired into a framework that rises to the left and right, with two large animal skulls turned outward at the front, a smaller one at the upper left, and a chair-like structure held in the middle of it all.
Sculpture in bone and found metal
A square panel of deep violet and black, over which broad pale green shapes made of thick paint and cloth are laid like shards of glass or pieces of ice. Their edges catch the light; between them the dark ground shows through in sharp angular gaps, so the surface reads as something breaking open and light coming through the cracks.
Out of the Darkness, the Lord Gave Us Light
2003
Carpet, cloth, Splash Zone compound, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood
72.5 × 74 × 3 in
A wide, almost black panel with dozens of small plastic dolls fixed all over it -- gold, white, blue and flesh-toned -- pinned at every angle, some caught mid-fall, some bound in place. Around them are stuffed animals, twisted black cloth and slashes of red and yellow paint, so the figures look scattered through wreckage.
Trophies (Doll Factory)
2000
Barbie dolls, stuffed animals, plastic toys, cloth, tin, wood, rope carpet, Splash Zone compound, oil, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood
75 × 123 × 18 in
An outdoor sculpture in a public park: a wide arch of welded black steel, perhaps two storeys high, built from salvaged wheels, tyres, sheet metal, ladders and curling rods, standing on a paved plaza behind a clipped hedge with mature trees rising behind it.
The Bridge — Freedom Park, Atlanta
1997
A square wall relief packed edge to edge with six-pointed starbursts cut from flattened paint cans in white, yellow, red, pink, blue and black, their lids still attached at the centres. At the middle, arms and legs flung wide across the stars, a life-size figure made of stiffened work clothes -- jacket, shirt and trousers -- with a green-grey face.
Stars of Everything
2004
Paint cans, plastic cans, spray paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood
98 × 101.5 × 20.5 in
See all work

1992

A large panel split between two worlds. On the left, a yellow field patterned with black-and-white bird or leaf shapes; on the right, a hot red ground crowded with black outlines of figures and animals. Long strips of bent tin and wood cut diagonally across the join, and paint runs down the surface in streaks.

Photograph by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

Work of the Month

Heading for the Higher-Paying Jobs

1992

Wood, tin, steel, wire screen, cloth, enamel and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood

64½ × 90 × 9 in

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

A rotating spotlight — one work, given room, with the story behind the materials. To change it, replace the photograph and edit the five lines here.

See the Work
A wide horizontal panel worked over entirely in blue and violet, so that the materials read as weather rather than as objects. Torn cloth, knotted rope, wire fencing and lengths of netting are crossed and lashed over one another and painted a single colour, with paler chalky blue caught on the raised edges like foam on a swell.

97 × 168 in · 2006–2011

Crossing Waters

Fourteen feet wide, and built the way he built everything: wire fencing, clothing, cloth, wood, corrugated tin, a shoe and ceramic figurines, lashed and layered across canvas over wood, then painted over in a single blue so that the objects stop being objects and become weather. The things caught in it were worn and used by somebody before they were art, and Dial does not disguise that — he floods it, so what you see first is a sea and what you see second is what is in it. Water carries a particular weight in his work: the Middle Passage, the flooding of the Ninth Ward, baptism, the crossing that is escape and the crossing that is drowning, all at once and without a caption telling you which. He made it over five years, from 2006 to 2011, in the years after Katrina. At this size the work is not a picture of a crossing so much as the scale of one.

Photograph by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

In His Own Words

Mr Dial Has Something to Say

Streams from YouTube. Filmmaker credit goes here.

Archives

Exhibitions & Museum Collections

Four decades of exhibitions, and the institutions that hold the work.

Browse

Media Archives

Publications, press, and documentary film.

Browse

Mr. Dial

Portraits, the studio, and what his family remembers.

Browse

Contact the Estate

Inquiries regarding exhibitions, loans, licensing, and press.

The Estate of Thornton Dial
P.O. Box 251, McCalla, AL 35111

Reproduction rights administered through Artists Rights Society (ARS).

PASTE THE CONTACT FORM SHORTCODE HERE