1928-2016 · Bessemer, Alabama, USA
An Alabama steelworker who made monumental assemblages about race, labour and American history, buried them in his yard, and lived to see them hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The life
Dial was born to a sharecropping family in rural Alabama and worked for three decades welding boxcars at the Pullman-Standard plant in Bessemer. He had always made things, but hid or buried them, since a Black man making strange objects in Jim Crow Alabama invited trouble. Discovered in 1987 through fellow artist Lonnie Holley, he spent his last decades producing enormous works that museums slowly realised belonged beside any contemporary art anywhere.
The work
Wall-sized constructions of rope, carpet, tin, bones, dolls and paint, wrestling with the Middle Passage, the tiger of Black survival, 9/11 and the labour that built America. The 2011 retrospective Hard Truths toured major museums, and the Souls Grown Deep Foundation later placed his work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Why we love them
He answers the tired question of whether outsider art can carry big ideas. Dial carried the biggest ones America has.
Go deeper
- Thornton Dial at the Outsider Art Fair
- Thornton Dial on Wikipedia
- Thornton Dial at Souls Grown Deep
- Souls Grown Deep Foundation
- Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
- The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.
Kindred spirits
Mary T. Smithc.1904-1995, Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA
Bessie Harvey1929-1994, Alcoa, Tennessee, USA
← All 155 artists in the field guide
Untrained and unstoppable, like them? Like us?