Artist Portfolio: Thornton Dial

About Thornton Dial

Dial grew up in Alabama in poverty and bombarded by rampant racism. He had virtually no opportunities for public education. He made art all of his life, sourcing his materials from the throwaways of the world around him—house paint, rope, miscellaneous metals, paper - whatever was available to him. He re-directed what he learned from years of building railroad cars for the Pullman Company for the Bessemer Steel Company into his making of art. Once a fellow Alabama artist and friend, Lonnie Holley, introduced him in the late 1980s to William Arnett—a scholar looking to discover and understand why the black culture of the south had produced jazz, but nothing was ever known about the visual equal to the music—Mr. Dial over the next 25 years came to be a prime ambassador of southern African-American visual culture. The relationship between Mr. Dial and Mr. Arnett has set a new standard for how artists and their patrons can together bring new insights to the world of contemporary art. 

Mr. Dial is often categorized as a self-taught or outsider artist, but the substance and techniques of the artwork he has produced far exceed those definitions. William Arnett, Mr. Dial’s key patron, says defining Thornton Dial’s work can be stated simply:  great American artist. Increasingly, there are references in articles and books to Mr. Dial’s work as the counterparts of jazz in American culture— completely original artwork stemming from experiences and knowledge way outside academic institutions and the parameters of the prevailing definitions of the art world, just as jazz came out of traditions alien to the prevailing definitions of the world of classical music.