News & Press

  1. Seismic Shifts: 10 Visionaries in Contemporary Art and Architecture

    Seismic Shifts will showcase artists and architects whose work challenges disciplinary boundaries and raises critical social, environmental and political issues. The exhibition includes seminal work by Nick Cave, Thornton Dial, Tom Friedman, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Betye Saar, and Bill Viola, and recent projects by architects Greg Lynn, Kate Orff, and Moshe Safdie.

    On view from January 31 through May 5, 2013 at the National Academy, Seismic Shifts will include painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, mixed media, video, and architectural models created between 2005 and 2012, with a number of new works featured.

    As original thinkers, this group of artists and architects has created paradigmatic shifts in contemporary culture. Their commitment to cultural investigation, conceptual inventiveness, and a curiosity of materials, as well as a desire to affect social, political, cultural and/or ecological change warrants special recognition.

    Posted January 2, 2013 in News & Press Tags:

  2. Atlanta Journal Constitution picks “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial” as a Favorite Show of 2012

    Thornton Dial in front of, “Crossing Waters,” at the High Museum. Photo: Phil Skinner

    December 20, 2012

    2012 Arts Year in Review: Creativity, ambition trumped economy in season of astonishing shows.  Our critics share their favorite events from the year.

    “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” High Museum of Art

    In the South it’s easy to be a little jaded when it comes to folk art. Too often such self-taught art reinforces cliches about the region that involve religious obsession. Alabama seer Thornton Dial’s operatic canvases shatter that stereotype with a dark, poetic vision and a profound engagement with social issues.

    Posted December 20, 2012 in News & Press Tags:

  3. Congressman John Lewis admires the ‘Hard Truths’ in Thornton Dial’s art – Atlanta Journal Constitution

    Congressman John Lewis with a work by Thornton Dial in his Atlanta office. Photo: Brant Sanderlin

    December 19, 2012

    By Howard Pousner

    They were born a dozen years apart and on different sides of Alabama, but U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and the acclaimed self-taught artist Thornton Dial had similar experiences growing up in segregated rural outposts during the Jim Crow era.

    Both rose from humble roots to national prominence in their respective fields, but on those rare occasions when these quiet-spoken friends of some two decades get to visit, they tend to talk more of their challenging days growing up and the way Alabama has changed than the worlds they have traversed and conquered.

    An art lover with a sizable collection he’s never counted or cataloged, Lewis proudly displays a large-scale Dial wall-mounted sculpture at his Atlanta office as well as paintings by his pal in his Washington and Atlanta homes.

    The 72-year-old politician considers himself a kindred spirit with the artist, 84, who is the subject of a nationally touring retrospective, “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial.”

    With “Hard Truths” on view at the High Museum of Art through March 3, we talked to Lewis about Dial, whom he calls “a very moving person,” and the places where their lives intersect.

    (more…)

    Posted December 19, 2012 in News & Press Tags: , ,

  4. Review: Engaging politics, race and hope, Thornton Dial’s masterful art rises above labels by Jerry Cullum – ArtsATL

    December 6, 2012

    “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” on display at the High Museum of Art through March 3, 2013, is the culmination of the 25-year rise to fame of an 84-year-old self-taught African-American artist whose origins, influences and originality all need to be reconsidered in a different intellectual framework. The categories of “folk art,” “contemporary art” and even “assemblage” and “conceptual art” do not serve us well any longer.

    There is, for example, a book to be written about the relationship between the practice of 20th-century modernist assemblage and the folk practices of the regions in which artists started assembling objects: Central Europe in the case of the Dadaists, of course, but also rural and urban America, from California (where found-object assemblage flourished before Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg made the practice famous) to the American South, where Rauschenberg grew up looking at African-American yard art, castoffs and discards arranged into provocative displays. (“Hard Truths” curators Joanne Cubbs’ and Eugene Metcalf’s catalog introduction cites a Newsweek story that claims Rauschenberg admitted this was an early experience.)

    (more…)

    Posted December 6, 2012 in News & Press Tags:

  5. Thornton Dial: ‘Viewpoint of the Foundry Man’ at Andrew Edlin by Andrew Russeth – The New York Observer

    December 4, 2012

    Save a visit to 84-year-old self-taught artist Thornton Dial’s show at Edlin for the end of the day. It’s a potent, cleansing tonic after the self-consciously refined contemporary art that dominates Chelsea. His new works are dense assemblages of paint and found objects, typically bent or battered on panels. They are intended to be autobiographical, recalling his life as a laborer in Emelle, Ala. The show’s namesake work (2012) is a tangle of bedsprings, punctured corrugated tin and other detritus, painted in earthen red, blue and silver. Recalling the Pain (2011) is an achingly spare Constructivist form, consisting of no more than a few chunks of charred wood that float about and touch in space like fragments of memories strung together. Like the artificial flowers that sprout up in some of these pieces, Mr. Thornton’s works are fragile–looking but resilient, evergreen tributes to the pleasure and pain of living life with, and through, art.

    Posted December 4, 2012 in News & Press Tags: ,

  6. Art review: ‘Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial’ at High by Felicia Feaster – Atlanta Journal Constitution

    Driving to the End of the World: Sheik, 2004

    November 9, 2012

    There is a certain stereotype of folk artists that fixes in the mind, of iconoclastic outsiders, often hyper-religious, superstitious, prone to visions and conspiracy.

    But 84-year-old African-American self-taught artist Thornton Dial, the subject of a remarkable survey at the High Museum, “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” tends to blow such preconceptions about this art genre sky-high.

    Despite Dial’s humble provenance as an illiterate welder and self-taught artist in Bessemer, Ala., his work suggests something else entirely. If you didn’t know a thing about Dial, you might think “Hard Truths” was the product of an angry young contemporary artist attuned to global politics and incensed by the injustices of class and race.

    Commanding three levels of the High Museum’s Anne Cox Chambers wing, “Hard Truths,” which runs through March 3 and is curated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Joanne Cubbs, offers a comprehensive view of this important artist’s work.

    This broad array of 59 works covers two decades in the artist’s career. Dial balances the lyrical and sweet in his delicate drawings — reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s early illustrations — in charcoal and colored pencil, alongside the monumental, propulsive and spirited tone of his large-scale paintings coated with tar-thick paint, insight and anger. Those monumental assemblages of paint and found objects address social injustices such as poverty, but also Sept. 11, the war in Iraq and the African slave trade. It is often dark and troubling work.

    (more…)

    Posted November 9, 2012 in News & Press Tags: ,

  7. Thornton Dial digs deep for ‘Hard Truths’ by Howard Pousner – Atlanta Journal Constitution

    Photo: Phil Skinner

    November 7, 2012

    “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” the newly opened exhibition at the High Museum of Art, commands seven galleries and all three floors of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing — a lot of valuable Peachtree Street real estate.

    Yet the display of 59 wall-mounted assemblages, free-standing sculptures and drawings form such a potent critique of social issues in America, and Dial is such a driven and prolific art-maker, one doesn’t doubt the 20-year retrospective could overtake another three stories.

    If that sounds like hyperbole, consider the response to “Hard Truths” when it opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year. The Wall Street Journal ran a rave review and later selected the show for its year’s best roundup along with exhibits by Picasso, Degas, Kandinsky and de Kooning. In fact, Dial was the only living artist included.

    In Time magazine, critic Richard Lacayo wrote a four-page ode that concluded, “Art is a word so contaminated these days by hype, misunderstanding and sales talk, it’s tempting sometimes to think we should try doing without it. Until you remember that it’s the one word spacious enough to contain what Dial does.”

    Reporting from Bessemer, the Alabama industrial town outside Birmingham that has been Dial’s base since he was a teen, The New York Times mused that the self-taught artist’s “marginalization” by the contemporary art establishment “may not last much longer.”

    U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a folk art collector and friend of Dial’s for several decades, sounded a similar note after touring “Hard Truths” at Charlotte’s Mint Museum during the Democratic convention.

    “Some people call it outsider art, but I think it should be included in ‘inside art,’ not just outside,” said Lewis, whose civil rights activism was commemorated by Dial in a public art work spanning 42 feet. “The Bridge” was dedicated in 2005 in Freedom Park off Ponce de Leon Avenue.

    Now 84, Dial himself represents a bridge to another time, another South, another kind of art-making.

    (more…)

    Posted November 7, 2012 in News & Press Tags: ,

  8. “Trouble in Mind: The Hard Truths of Thornton Dial” by Scott Lucas – Creative Loafing

    August 1, 2012

    Link to Creative Loafing

    “Life’s been tough with me, how’s it been with you?” – Thornton Dial

    Thornton Dial is 83 years old. He managed to get through his first 60 years without fame or fortune or a host of interested white people. About 25 years ago, Mr. Dial was visited at his home in Bessemer, Ala., by a man named Bill Arnett, an art collector and advocate for Southern black artists. Particularly undiscovered or under-recognized Southern black artists. He liked what he saw in Mr. Dial’s yard and workshop.

    Arnett’s arrival, advocacy for, and eventual friendship with the artist launched exposure of Dial’s extraordinary talent to a much wider world, and also unintentionally opened up a new world of hurt for Dial. As the artist’s star rose — predictably, as any set of eyes connected to functioning frontal lobes might guess — trouble came brewing from the folks at 60 Minutes.

    In 1993, concurrent with two inaugural New York shows including Dial’s work, 60 Minutes aired an “exposé” on shady dealings in the “folk” or “outsider” art world. Arnett and Dial were guests; neither expected the broadside Morley Safer delivered. The TV reporter cast Arnett as an opportunistic and manipulative art dealer, and Dial as one of the clueless dupes. The portrayals were inaccurate and unjust, but the damage done.

    Safer’s prime-time beatdown was unwarranted and it left Dial with long-lasting bruises — professionally, financially and emotionally. Dial still had the incident on his mind 10 years later when he hanged himself in effigy in his painting “Strange Fruit: Channel 42, 2003.” That painting hangs in the Mint Museum today, and it is a sharp reminder of how deep a wound mere words can leave, particularly if the words are cast from a high spot to a wide audience.

    (more…)

    Posted August 1, 2012 in News & Press Tags: , , ,

  9. “Backyard Alchemist: The Art of Thornton Dial” by Phillip Larrimore – Charlotte Viewpoint

    "Trophies (Doll Factory)" by Thornton Dial

    June 21, 2012

    The career of Thornton Dial, who is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Mint Museum, might illustrate Goethe’s dictum that, “when a man does something remarkable, the world conspires to make sure he doesn’t do it again.” In Dial’s case, the world tried, but fortunately it did not succeed.

    What very nearly derailed things, just as his work was being launched, was a hatchet job on 60 Minutes. Morley Safer (who, it must be noted, always had a malign touch regarding the arts) implied that Dial and his long-term patron, Bill Arnett, were locked in an exploitive, Svengali-esque relationship, and that there was no way a poor “outsider” artist from Alabama could make work of Dial’s virtuosity on his own. Safer’s mistake – an egregious one – was not to realize that neither formal range or technical ingenuity can be summoned out of the blue; genius may be recognized but no one can wish, grant, or foist it on another.  Read more…

    Posted June 21, 2012 in News & Press Tags: , ,

  10. “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial a must-see at NOMA” by Doug MacCash – The Times-Picayune

    March 1, 2012

    Trust me, you’re going to love the 40 huge, lusciously colored, lavishly textured, carefully composed paintings, sculptures and drawings in the exhibit ‘Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,’ now on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Be sure to keep your hands in your pockets, because you may be tempted to reach out and touch the rusted car parts, lost toys, animal skulls, bones, cans, rope and other magnetically tactile materials Dial uses to create his epic works.  Read more…

    Posted April 11, 2012 in News & Press Tags: , , ,

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