?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
THORNTON DIAL (1928 - ) Clinton Campaigning as the Sun Rises.
Watercolor, pastel and charcoal on heavy wove paper, 1997. 775x552 mm; 30 1/2x21 3/4 inches. Initialed in pencil, lower right. Titled and dated in pencil on the verso.
Thornton Dial was born in 1928 in Emelle, AL, where he was raised by his great-grandmother. He moved to Bessemer, and became a metalworker at a local Pullman-Standard boxcar factory until its closing in 1981. Not completing school beyond the third grade, Dial is a self-taught artist, known for utilizing welded metal scraps and other found objects in his assemblages. Both his assemblages and his works on paper are often imbued with a political framework, yet are viewed as having an "outsider" perspective.
In the late 1980s, Dial was able to focus on his art full time with a monthly stipend from Atlanta art patron William Arnett. Dial's career quickly blossomed, as by 1993, he had two concurrent solo exhibitions in New York City--one at the Museum of American Folk Art, the other at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has also been included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2005. His first career retrospective, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, was recently exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and will continue to New Orleans, Atlanta and Charlotte, NC.
