Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Thornton Dial: Viewpoint of the Foundry Man, on view from November 10 – December 29, 2012. The exhibition features approximately fifteen of the artist’s renowned mixed media assemblages, created over the last 3 years. An exhibition catalogue is available and features “Coming Back Clear,” an essay by Karen Wilkin along with a preface by Phillip March Jones.
Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
Posted November 10, 2012 in Exhibitions Tags: Andrew Edlin Gallery, Thornton Dial: Viewpoint of the Foundry Man
Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial opened May 25, 2012 at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. The exhibition explores parallels and intersections in the works of the world-famous Gee’s Bend quilters and the self-taught master of assemblage art, Thornton Dial. Quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural community southwest of Selma, Ala., feature a sophisticated orchestration of color and eccentric quasi-geometric shapes composing what the New York Times has said are “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The 82-year-old Thornton Dial has earned international recognition as one of the most compelling and original voices of our time. Rich in allusion and metaphor, Dial’s dynamic assemblages weave together memories of his own life with reflections on universal experiences of struggle and triumph. He shares with the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend a debt to African American aesthetic traditions, most notably the cemetery constructions and yard art of the rural South, as well as an inventive approach to the reconstruction of found materials in the creation of an extraordinary visual poetry.
Exhibit runs May 25-Sept 2, 2012. www.fristcenter.org
This exhibition has been organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta, Ga.
Posted June 6, 2012 in Blog, Exhibitions Tags: Creation Story, Frist Center for Visual Arts, Quilts of Gee's Bend, Thornton Dial
March 30 – July 1, 2012
While most recognized for his large scale, multi-media assemblages, Thornton Dial’s drawings are his most prolific body of work, spanning from the early 1990s into the present. Organized by the Ackland Art Museum, Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper will feature 50 of Dial’s earliest drawings from 1990-1991, a pivotal moment in his artistic career.
The Ackland Art Museum is well known for its extensive collection of works on paper and in particular, its outstanding collection of drawings, making it a natural venue in which to explore this less-known but highly significant portion of Dial’s oeuvre. The works in the exhibition – characterized by flowing lines, color washes, and images of women, fish, and tigers – provide a touchstone of Dial’s creative process.
A fully-illustrated book, Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper, co-published by the Ackland Art Museum and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will be available. The book is edited by Bernard L. Herman, with contributions by Bernard L. Herman, Juan Logan, Glenn Hinson, Colin Rhodes, and Cara Zimmerman.
Posted January 12, 2012 in Exhibitions Tags: Ackland Art Museum, Thornton Dial
May 25 – September 3, 2012
This exhibition explores parallels and intersections in the works of the world-famous Gee’s Bend quilters and the self-taught master of assemblage art, Thornton Dial. Quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, a small rural community southwest of Selma, Alabama., feature a sophisticated orchestration of color and eccentric quasi-geometric shapes composing what the New York Times has said are “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
The 82-year-old Thornton Dial has earned international recognition as one of the most compelling and original voices of our time. Rich in allusion and metaphor, Dial’s dynamic assemblages weave together memories of his own life with reflections on universal experiences of struggle and triumph. He shares with the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend a debt to African American aesthetic traditions, most notably the cemetery constructions and yard art of the rural South, as well as an inventive approach to the reconstruction of found materials in the creation of an extraordinary visual poetry.
This exhibition has been organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta, Ga.
Posted January 12, 2012 in Exhibitions Tags: Frist Center for Visual Arts, Quilts of Gee's Bend, Thornton Dial
February 25 - September 18, 2011
Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial highlights the artist’s significant contribution to the field of American art and shows how Dial’s work speaks to the most pressing issues of our time—including thewar in Iraq, 9/11, and social issues like racism and homelessness. The exhibition presents 70 of Dial’s large-scale paintings, drawings and found-object sculptures, including 25 works on view for the first time. Spanning twenty years of his work as an artist, it is the most extensive showing of his art ever mounted.
Karen Wilkin of the Wall Street Journal included Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial in her Best of Art 2011 alongside major shows of Degas, de Kooning, and the new Islamic wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of Hard Truths Wilkin writes:
“At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial honored an American original. The self-taught Mr. Dial, born in 1928 in rural Alabama, invented a personal, vernacular approach to collage: aggressively articulated, expressively—and beautifully—colored constructions incorporating a startling assortment of scavenged materials. Two decades of relief paintings, free-standing sculptures and drawings attested to Mr. Dial’s power. Their titles asserted deep convictions about ecology, civil rights, the role of women, and politics; their quirky materiality declared their affinity with the oddball objects in Southern ‘yard shows,’ but no special pleading was required for the art or its author. Whatever the works’ lineage or motivations, whatever Mr. Dial’s history, ‘Hard Truths’ was an impressive survey of first-rate works by a major artist. Period.”
New Orleans Museum of Art, February 24 – May 20, 2012
Mint Museum, June 2 – September 30, 2012
High Museum of Art, November 3, 2012 – March 3, 2013
Posted January 11, 2012 in Exhibitions
November 16,.2007 – May 11, 2008
Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, making quilts was considered a domestic responsibility for women in Gee’s Bend. As young girls, many of the women trained or apprenticed in their craft with their mothers, female relatives, or friends; other quilters, however, have been virtually self- taught. Women with large families often made dozens upon dozens of quilts over the course of their lives. The women consider the process of “piecing” the quilt “top” to be highly personal. In Gee’s Bend, the top—the side that faces up on the bed—is always pieced by a quilter working alone and reflects a singular artistic vision. The subsequent process of “quilting” the quilt—sewing together the completed top, the batting (stuffing), and the back—is sometimes then performed communally, among small groups of women.
The women of Gee’s Bend developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional African-American quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. Art critics worldwide have compared this geometric simplicity to the works of important artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee. The New York Times called the quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
This exhibition puts the Gee’s Bend quilts in context by featuring the work of master quilt maker Mary Lee Bendolph and those she influenced, accompanied by the art of artists working in the found-object tradition who are part of her artistic sphere, including Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley. Also shown is another interpretation of the quilt, in which Mary Lee and her daughter-in- law, Louisiana Bendolph, made a series of fine art prints based on their quilt designs in 2005. Finally, a documentary film about the women of Gee’s Bend accompanies the exhibition.
Knoxville Museum of Art, July 10 – September 21, 2008
Loveland Museum & Gallery, CO, November 15, 2008 – February 8, 2009
Missouri Historical Society, April 12 – September 13, 2009
Berman Museum of World History, AL, October 2, 2009 – January 3, 2010
Flint Institute of Arts, MI, January 23 – April 18, 2010
Posted January 11, 2012 in Exhibitions
June 4 – September 4, 2006
In 2002 the inaugural exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend documented the quiltmaking achievements of the African American community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Presented at thirteen major museums around the United States,the show prompted an outpouring of popular interest and international critical acclaim. Expanding upon that initial exhibition and its accompanying publications, Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt offers a deeper look into the women and their art, and a more focused investigation into the nature and inspirations—and future—of the Gee’s Bend quilt tradition.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, October 8 – December 31, 2006
Orlando Museum of Art, January 28 – May 15, 2007
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD: June 16 – August 26, 2007
Tacoma Art Museum, September 22 – December 9, 2007
The Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY: January 2 – March 23, 2008
Denver Museum of Art, April 13 – July 6, 2008
Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 14 – December 14, 2008
Posted January 11, 2012 in Exhibitions
September 25, 2005 – January 8, 2006
Since 2000, Thornton Dial (born 1928) has embarked on one of the most remarkable creative journeys in American visual art. Following his discovery by the art world in the late 1980s, he became in the 1990s a widely known African American vernacular artist. Coinciding with the turn of the millennium, Dial has spent the eighth decade of his life on overlapping cycles of epic-scale artworks that summarize the grand sweep of his improbable life’s story.
This groundbreaking exhibition follows the artist’s exploration of interlined topics, including a halting suite of works about September 11, 2001; contemporary ” history paintings” on life in America since the events of 9/11; homages to his friends, the women quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and their craft; a new type of “art about art” in which Dial responds to works from the disparate cultural dialogues (including art by academically trained and vernacular artists); memories of vanishing ways of life and his childhood in the the South; and evocations of human struggles for freedom.
Posted March 8, 2005 in Exhibitions
September 6 – November 10, 2002
November 11, 2002 - March 9, 2003
From its beginning at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Whitney Museum of American, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition received unprecedented critical acclaim and broke attendance records over the course of on its twelve-city American tour. The New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, Art in America, CBS News Sunday Morning, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer are among the hundreds of print and broadcast media organizations that have celebrated the quilts and the history of this unique community. The New York Times called the quilts “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Mobile Museum of Art, July 14 – August 31, 2003
Milwaukee Art Museum, September 27, 2003 – January 4, 2004
Corcoran Gallery of Art, February 14 – May 17, 2004
Cleveland Museum of Art, July 27 – September 12, 2004
Chrysler Museum of Art, VA, October 15, 2004 – January 2, 2005
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, February 2, 2005 – May, 8, 2005
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, June 1 – August 21, 2005
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, September 11 – December 4, 2005
High Museum of Art, GA, March 25 – June 18, 2006
Museum of Art, Ft Lauderdale, September 7, 2007 – January 7, 2008
Posted September 6, 2002 in Exhibitions
Presented as part of the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South was a major survey of African-American self-taught art, containing more than 300 art works by over 40 contemporary African-American artists of the Southeast.
Writing in Newsweek, critic Malcolm Jones, Jr. reviewed the cultural events presented in conjunction with the Atlanta Olympic Games:
“The show that ought to be showcased in the High Museum, the show that best exemplifies the South’s unique contribution to art, has been relegated to a lesser space in City Hall East, a venue that’s harder to find but worth the trouble. ‘Souls Grown Deep,’ an enormous collection of vernacular art —what used to be called primitive art —by Southern African-Americans is the show to see in Atlanta. Enter through a front yard re-created right down to the dirt floor, but a yard transformed, with broken tombstones, sprinkler heads, bedsprings, paintings, baby-doll parts—and all of it rejiggered by artist Lonnie Holley into a phantasmagorical vision as surreptitiously coherent as a dream. The rest of the show is not quite so overwhelming, but every piece is a wonder. Roots painted to look like faces, driftwood, burned televisions, roller skates, porch furniture cut apart and refashioned into strange abstract sculpture, or iconic people and animals cut from bits of sheet metal. Making art out of ordinary stuff—trash, really, the flotsam of daily life that we all see but don’t see—these artists offer a rebuke to our lack of imagination. But it’s done with such finesse and the results are so surprisingly beautiful that we forget to complain. Robert Rauschenberg recently said that seeing ‘yard art’ like this when he was growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, helped inspire his assemblages of the ’50s and ’60s, and that statement underscores not only the uniqueness of this work but also its sense of visual sophistication.”
Posted February 22, 1996 in Exhibitions