Thornton DialOfficial Estate Site

TD

The Art

Assemblage, sculpture, and works on paper — tin, steel, rope, carpet, bone, roots, paint, watercolour and found material. Five decades of work, arranged to show how it changed.

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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
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 wide panel entirely in red and raw pink, worked into folds and flaps of torn cloth and tin that hang and overlap like sides of meat on a rail. The one interruption is a small painted American flag near the top right, no bigger than a hand, in blue, red and white.
Meat
2003
Tin, cloth, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood
72.5 × 97.5 × 5.5 in
An upright panel covered in looping brushstrokes of orange, blue-grey and black that move across it like current. Two figures are built up out of bent and painted metal within the pattern: one at the top left with a masklike face, one below reaching across, holding what reads as a long-handled broom made of folded tin.
Sweep Me Baby, Sweep Me All Night Long
1994
Metal, enamel and spray paint on canvas on wood
72 × 48 in
A room built in relief on a panel. Three figures made of work clothes and torn sheet metal sit at a rough wooden desk holding a book and a small keyboard. On the wall behind them hang a stopped clock, a framed photograph of the US Capitol, a small portrait and a printed card; a model sailing ship sits at the lower right, and red paint pools along the bottom edge.
Mr. Dial’s America
On a white ground, five dark figures made of cut and painted cloth stride from left to right. One reaches an arm out across the picture, one raises a hand, one at the right carries a pack of metal grating on his back. Beneath them runs a low band of brown and grey scraps, like ground or road worn flat.
Remembering the Road
1992
Tin, rope carpet, cloth, vinyl, carpet, wire screen, feed sacks, enamel and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood
85.5 × 121 × 3.5 in

Photograph by Gamma One Conversions

Assemblage · 1992

Remembering the Road

Five figures walk left to right across a white ground, cut from cloth and painted dark. One throws an arm out across the picture, one raises a hand, and the one at the right carries a load of metal grating on his back. Under them runs a low band of brown and grey scraps, worn flat, which is the road itself.

The road is one of Mr. Dial’s long subjects. He was born in Emelle, in the Black Belt, and left it for Bessemer and thirty years of building railcars at Pullman Standard — the same road out of the rural South that millions of Black Americans took in the Great Migration. The figures here are not arriving anywhere. They are still walking.

What they are made of is the argument. Tin, rope carpet, feed sacks, wire screen and vinyl — the materials of farm work and factory work, the things that pass through the hands of the people in the picture. The binder holding it together is Splash Zone compound, a marine epoxy meant for patching ships below the waterline: a repair material, used to make something that lasts.

It hangs three and a half inches off the wall. That depth is not incidental — the figures stand out from their ground and cast their own shadows, so the work is closer to a relief than a painting, and the walking reads as something happening in front of you rather than behind glass.

The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University took this work’s title for his 1996 solo exhibition, Thornton Dial: Remembering The Road.

Everything in this wide panel has been painted the same saturated yellow and orange -- a jungle of stiffened cloth, sprayed bedding and artificial flowers. A child's doll stands upright near the top left, arms out, painted yellow like the rest, and a cluster of small toys in pink and red is fixed to the right edge, one of the few things left its own colour.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle

Plastic soda bottles, a doll, bedding, wire, a rubber glove, a turtle shell and artificial flowers, seventy-five by a hundred and twelve inches. Given the full width of the screen, because at any smaller size the materials disappear.

Photograph by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

Reproduction rights in Thornton Dial’s artwork may be administered by Artists Rights Society (ARS). Contact the Estate for licensing inquiries.

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