Thornton Dial, Outsider Artist Whose Work Told of Black Life, Dies at 87
Source: NYT
Thornton Dial, a self-taught artist whose paintings and assemblages fashioned from scavenged materials told the story of black struggle in the South and found their way to the permanent collections of major museums, died on Monday at his home in McCalla, Ala. He was 87.
...
Mr. Dial, the illiterate son of an unwed teenage mother, spent much of his childhood in rural poverty in western Alabama and, after moving to Bessemer, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, labored at a wide variety of occupations, all the while making works from castoff materials that he came to think of as art only when he was in his 50s.
In 1987, Lonnie Holley, a self-taught artist living in Birmingham, showed William Arnett, an Atlanta collector interested in Southern folk art, one of Mr. Dial’s decorated fish lures. The two men went to see Mr. Dial, who, once he realized what Mr. Arnett was looking for, pulled a painted, welded-steel sculpture topped by a stylized steel turkey out of a turkey coop.
“I knew I was witnessing something great coming out of that turkey coop,” Mr. Arnett said in a statement issued by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which he established to preserve and document African-American vernacular art. “I didn’t know at the time that it wasn’t simply the sculpture that was special. The man who had created it was a great man, and he would go on to become recognized as one of America’s greatest artists. I can’t think of any important artist who has started with less or accomplished more.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/arts/thornton-dial-outsider-artist-whose-work-told-of-black-life-dies-at-87.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
