Spotlight Finally Shines On Thornton Dial Sr. In Birmingham, AL

Sometimes, the home folks are the hardest to impress. Long after the wider world has opened its arms, home folks continue casting a leery eye.

Alabama’s Thornton Dial Sr. (1928–2016) had his first solo museum exhibition jointly presented by the New Museum and the American Folk Art Museum in New York in 1993. His work was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 2005, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston gave him a solo show. In 2011, another solo presentation visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Mint Museum in Charlotte and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.

His work is in the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and dozens more.

The most prestigious art museums and events in America have long considered him an essential.

Not the home folks.

The first comprehensive survey of Dial’s work in Alabama opened September 9, 2022 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

“I feel like Alabama has a long history of not embracing the talent in our own back yard, especially when it comes to visual art,” John Fields, The Lydia Cheney and Jim Sokol Endowed Director of Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, told Forbes.com. “Lonnie Holley, Kerry James Marshall, Jack Whitten, Mary Frances Whitfield–these are just a handful of significant artists who all came out of the Birmingham area and found tremendous success in other parts of the country.”

Before finding love for their art in Alabama.

“Pre-internet, Birmingham and Alabama were so isolated from the rest of the country in terms of fine art and culture, it just wasn’t accessible unless you traveled. In so many ways, Dial and Holley were so ahead of their time in relation to where Alabama was culturally,” Fields explains. “Most of Alabama had no frame of reference for the works being produced by these artists. We didn’t grow up going to MoMA and most of us received little to no arts education. I never set foot into an art museum until I was an adult. The astute and sophisticated art enthusiasts and art galleries recognized them for what they are, but those people are such a small part of the larger community. There was also some very unfortunate art-world politics and I would suspect plenty of good ol’ fashioned racism.”

Dial is Black. So is Holley. And Marshall, Whitten and Whitfield.

From Fishing Lures to The Met

“Mr. Dial made things his entire life, but didn’t necessarily consider what he made ‘art,’” curator for the AEIVA exhibition, “I, too, Am Alabama,” Paul Barrett told Forbes.com. “His earliest surviving creations are his fishing lures which he made and used as early as the 1960s. We’re very fortunate to have a variety of these on display at AEIVA. Other works prior to 1987 were broken down and re-used for parts in other works, so the fishing lures are particularly important records of his artistic practice.”

The lures–pardon the pun–also helped lure the art world to Dial.

In 1987, Holley took his friend and art collector William Arnett to meet Dial. Arnett was in the process of amassing the finest collection of Black folk art from across the South, a collection that would inspire the legendary Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Holley had been on the lookout for unheralded Black artists in the Birmingham area, and based on a suggestion from a former girlfriend, found Dial.

Dial gave Holley some of his fishing lures as a gift after their introduction. When Arnett saw them, he asked for an introduction and the rest is history.

Artisan Before Artist

What Dial lacked in formal art education–any kind of formal education for that matter–he made up for with an innate knack for working with his hands. Craftsmanship. Creativity. The manual figuring of things out.

Born on a former cotton plantation in the middle of nowhere in west-central Alabama, his teenage mother worked as a sharecropper. He grew up without a father and lived in poverty for much of his early life. He eventually moved to the Birmingham area where he worked as a machinist, fabricating train boxcars at the Pullman Standard plant in Bessemer until it closed in 1981.

He earned extra money cutting hair in his living room and selling his lures.

He worked for United States Pipe and Foundry Co. in Bessemer and founded Dial Metal Patterns with his family, fabricating patio furniture and other metal objects including benches for the VisionLand theme park.

He planted a community garden in the Pipe Shop neighborhood where he lived, renting additional land from the city of Bessemer and maintaining it with the help of his family.

“Mr. Dial was quiet and very reserved around people he didn’t know well–and I never had the privilege of knowing him well. By the time I visited him in his studio for the first time in 2010, he had endured hernia surgery, pneumonia and his first stroke,” Barrett recalls. “At some of our later meetings his health issues were sometimes so severe that he couldn’t speak. To his family, he was a loving father who worked hard to take care of them. To his co-workers and employees, he was a skilled machinist and problem-solver who earned their respect. To his neighbors, he was a pillar of his community who helped others whenever he could. His friends and family remember him cracking jokes often and being kind to others.”

Homecoming

Along with the major exhibition at AEIVA which runs through December 10, 2022, two companion exhibitions present the most comprehensive examination of Dial’s work ever presented in Alabama. “Anyone Can Move a Mountain” at Maus Contemporary features works by the artists commissioned to write for AEIVA’s catalog, and “I, Too, Am Thornton Dial” at the Samford University Gallery will focus on Dial’s extraordinary works on paper.

The UAB exhibition highlights the work Dial is best known for: found object sculptures and densely layered assemblages. His subjects range from family and daily life to the Civil Rights Movement. Included are pieces that have never been exhibited or published before, as well as 360-degree video of his studio and documentary footage of Dial creating one of his signature drawings.

Dial’s family was involved at every step of the way through the development of “I, Too, Am Alabama.” Unlike their fellow Alabamians, they recognized the brilliance at work down the block.

“The tears of joy, laughter and happiness that transpired from his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are why this show was essential for us to exhibit here at AEIVA,” Tina Ruggieri, assistant curator at AEIVA and organizing curator, told Forbes.com. “It truly was the homecoming that Mr. Dial deserved. His legacy will continue to live on in his home state because of this show.”