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Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
THORNTON DIAL (1928 - 2016) Untitled.
Enamel on plywood board, 1988. Approximately 667x768 mm; 26 1/4x30 1/4 inches.
Provenance: Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; private collection, Connecticut.
Exhibited: Thornton Dial. The Earliest Years: 1987-89., March, New York, June 6 - July 31, 2001.
Born in Emelle, Alabama, Thornton Dial 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. Dial is a self-taught artist who first welded metal scraps and other found objects into assemblages. Dial later used more traditional materials, creating paintings, works on paper and assemblages that explore a wide range of socio-political subjects from war and religious mysteries to racism and homelessness.
In the late 1980s, Dial was introduced to Atlanta art collector William S. Arnett by artist Lonnie Hall. Dial was able to focus on his art full time with a monthly stipend from Arnett who then introduced Dial's work to the art world. Dial's career quickly blossomed, and by 1993, he had two concurrent solo exhibitions in New York--one at the Museum of American Folk Art, the other at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His first career retrospective, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, was exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and then between 2011-13 travelled to New Orleans, Atlanta and Charlotte.
On November 24, 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that 57 works by African American artists from the South —including 10 works by Dial—had been donated by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from its William S. Arnett Collection. Works by Dial are now in numerous institutional collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
