The Lower East Side's David Lewis gallery currently has on view Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City featuring eight of late artist Thornton Dial’s intricate found object assemblages. Discarded materials including carpet, bedding, clothing, wood, tin, rope, even an animal jawbone, are given magnificent new life in the hands of the self-taught artist.
Born in Emelle, Alabama in 1928 to a single mother, Dial grew up on a sharecropping farm where he started picking cotton at an early age. Receiving very little formal education, Dial worked in many construction jobs, such as a bricklayer, house painter, and carpenter. He was employed as a welder at Birmingham’s Pullman Standard Company for nearly 30 years until the company closed in 1981. Dial retired that same year and began focusing on his art, a hobby he’d picked up in his youth, according to artnet.
Dial met the art collector William Arnett in 1987. Arnett had amassed a vast collection of work by Black—mainly self-taught—artists from the American South and founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in 2010 to house and manage hundreds of these works. Arnett provided Dial with a weekly allowance, offering the artist the freedom to fully devote himself to his art, according to Arnett’s August 2020 obituary in ARTnews.
The current exhibit at David Lewis is named after a 1990 work by Dial inspired by his first visit to NYC. A white tiger glides above the peaked rooftops of the congested city—pristine white skyscrapers towering above bleak tenement buildings composed of brown carpet—representing “the struggle for life, liberation, and justice,” according to the show’s press release. Colorful striped tigers also appear in Dial’s Patterns: Road Map of the United States (1992) and All the Cats in Town (1993), displaying joy and energy in their united fight for freedom.
“People say I make all my art about tigers, but I got tigers in just some of it,” Dial told Arnett in an interview compiled at soulsgrowndeep.org. “Women be in just about everything I have made, in one way or another way. That tiger for me symbolized the Struggle, in the works of life, but women are the creation of the world, at the creation of all works. If it wasn’t for women it wouldn’t be none of us here, and without them we couldn’t make it through the struggle.”
Dial pays tribute to the women who helped raise him in his two takes on the time-honored African American tradition of quilt-making, In the Making of Our Oldest Things and In Honor. “Women was the ones always responsible for me. My great-grandmother raised me up. After she died when I was ten years old, I went to my mother’s sister, stayed there for two years, then come to Bessemer. Sarah Lockett [his grandmother’s sister] took me in and raised me on up,” Dial told Arnett.
“Women are the creation of the world,” the artist continued. “They give love and care, and they also give strength and power. But you got to listen. I always paid attention to what the women was saying, ever since I were a little fellow. Women back then was picking cotton, doing hard time fieldwork, cooking, making, and providing.”
Dial’s first exhibition, Ladies of the United States, in Atlanta, 1990, featured work on plywood with house paint, rope, and tin. In an interview with Arnett, Dial recalled a critic condemning the show: “Mr. Dial can’t draw worth nothing and his art is ugly.” Despite this negative early review, Dial eventually found success in the art world. His work was exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions across the country and was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Dial died in 2016 in McCalla, Alabama at 87.
“I like to use the stuff that I know about, stuff that I know the feel of,” Dial told Arnett. “There’s some kind of things I always liked to make stuff with. I’m talking about tin, steel, copper, and aluminum, and also old wood, carpet, rope, old clothes, sand, rocks, wire, screen, toys, tree limbs, and roots. You could say, ‘If Dial see it, he know what to do with it.’” This statement sums up Dial’s work perfectly. The artist had a natural ability to take discarded objects and transform them into showstoppers. Click here to see my 2011 article on Dial’s show at Andrew Edlin Gallery which was held in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The Tiger That Flew over New York City is one part of a two-part exhibition of Dial’s work presented by David Lewis. The second part is taking place at 47 West 12th Street. Email [email protected] to schedule an appointment to visit that location.
Thornton Dial
Dial World, Part I: The Tiger That Flew over New York City
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, NYC
Exhibition on view October 24 through December 20
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