Freedom

As Dial surveys his “world”—the spheres of his childhood in Emelle, his neighborhoods and life experiences in Bessemer, and the kindred spirits inhabiting these milieus—his superimposition of meanings weaves a sturdy fabric of art, autobiography, otherness (he uses the term “strangeness”), and incident. This is the home ground for Dial’s culturally self-determining aesthetic. Freedom shows a black laborer, made from a shovel handle, reaching for both the Statue of Liberty (a black woman whose torch is a covered dish) and for an emblem of “black” art. While he clutches Liberty, his left hand reaches for a small inset painting that functions as a play-within-the-play. The inset easel canvas has been overpainted black and piled with scraps of clothing and found metal, a symbol for vernacular art and the struggle for aesthetic liberty alongside economic freedom. —Paul Arnett