Essay by Karen Wilkin
Preface by Phillip March Jones
Published by Andrew Edlin Gallery
77 pages; 40 color plates
This publication accompanies the exhibition Thornton Dial: Viewpoint of the Foundry Man, presented at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, from November 8 to December 29, 2012
Posted November 8, 2012 in Publications Tags: Andrew Edlin Gallery, Karen Wilkin, Phillip March Jones, Thornton Dial: Viewpoint of the Foundry Man
Edited by Mark Scala with essays by Phillip March Jones, Paul Arnett, and Joanne Cubbs
128 pages; 43 color plates
Hardcover
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2012
Creation Story explores parallels and intersections in the works of Dial and his fellow Alabamians, the remarkable quilters of Gee’s Bend. In the tradition of African American cemetery constructions and yard art, these artists harness the tactile properties and symbolic associations of cast-off materials in creating an art of profound beauty and evocative power. Produced against a backdrop of poverty and racism, these artworks have an appeal that crosses aesthetic, social, and geographical boundaries, earning them wide recognition as being among the most compelling art of our time.
The quilters of Gee’s Bend, a small rural community near Selma, Alabama, use salvaged fabric in orchestrations of strong colors, dynamic patterns, and eccentric geometric shapes. While drawing from classic traditions of American quilt making, their sensitivity to the evocative power of materials and fine balance of optical tension and harmony marks their quilts as truly original. The New York Times has called them “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Going beyond the beauty and tactile richness of the Gee’s Bend quilts, the densely layered assemblages of Thornton Dial are, in his words, “about ideas, and about life, and the experiences of the world.” A keen observer and interpreter of his times, Dial uses the technique of bricolage–the aesthetic reconfiguring of found objects–to reflect on personal memories, insights into root causes of racism and poverty, and news events and programs he sees on television. The Wall Street Journal has called Dial’s works “tough, beautiful, disturbing, seductive, improvisatory, unignorable, fierce, exhilarating, ambiguous–and much more.” While Dial’s social symbolism contrasts with the inherent abstraction of the Gee’s Bend quilts, the two are linked by an appreciation for the poetic and evidentiary power of raw materials, which they transform into expressions of beauty and truth.
The artworks reproduced in this exhibition catalog are drawn from the extensive collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. The 43 color plates are accompanied by illustrated essays by curators Paul Arnett, Joanne Cubbs, and Phillip March Jones.
Posted June 6, 2012 in Publications Tags: Creation Story, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Quilts of Gee's Bend, Thornton Dial
Edited by Bernard L. Herman
224 pages; 86 color illustrations
Hardcover, cloth
The University of North Carolina Press, 2012
Published in association with Ackland Art Museum
Thornton Dial (b. 1928), one of the most important artists in the American South, came to prominence in the late 1980s and was celebrated internationally for his large construction pieces and mixed-media paintings. It was only later, in response to a reviewer’s negative comment on his artistic ability, that he began to work on paper. And it was not until recently that these drawings have received the acclaim they deserve. This volume, edited by Bernard L. Herman, offers the first sustained critical attention to Dial’s works on paper.
Concentrating on Dial’s early drawings, the contributors examine Dial’s use of line and color and his recurrent themes of love, lust, and faith. They also discuss the artist’s sense of place and history, relate his drawings to his larger works, and explore how his drawing has evolved since its emergence in the early 1990s. Together, the essays investigate questions of creativity and commentary in the work of African American artists and contextualize Dial’s works on paper in the body of American art.
Contributors: Cara Zimmerman, Bernard Herman, Glenn Hinson, Juan Logan, and Colin Rhodes. Forward by Emily Kass.
Posted April 11, 2012 in Publications Tags: Ackland Art Museum, Thornton Dial, Thoughts on Paper, UNC
Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett
568 pages; 801 illustrations
Hardcover, clothbound
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2000
The African American culture of the South has produced many of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Widely appreciated for its music—from the blues and jazz, to gospel, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—the region has also played host to a less visible but equally important visual art tradition. Working without significant formal training, often employing the most unpretentious and unlikely materials, these grassroots artists have created powerful statements that, like the music, are strongly influenced by the legacies of African belief systems, rooted in community, and committed to cultural continuity. At the sametime, however, this quintessentially American art testifies to the originality and transformative force of individual imaginations.
Since the 1980s, popular and critical interest in this genre has grown dramatically and has given it many names: “self-taught,” “folk,” “outsider,” “visionary.” Souls Grown Deep: African AmericanVernacular Art is the opening work in a multi-volume study that offers the first comprehensive exploration of this art form’s development during the late twentieth century, an era shaped by the civil rights movement. Souls Grown Deep illuminates a remarkable spectrum of creativity: the media of painting, sculpture, and works on paper; the region’s outdoor art environments and art installations; historical examples from earlier eras; and relevant decorative arts and crafts.
With unprecedented thoroughness and scope, Souls Grown Deep takes readers inside these creators’ worlds. The book includes lavishly illustrated, full-color chapters on forty vernacular artists. Writing from diverse perspectives, thirty-seven contributing writers—including civil rights leaders, art historians, museum curators, and folklorists—present thematic, and historical overviews crucial to and understanding of the art’s origins.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications Tags: Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Tinwood Books, William Arnett
Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett
612 pages; 1,008 full-color illustrations
Hardcover, clothbound
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2001
Completing the two-volume set, Souls Grown Deep, Vol. 2 takes the visual and historical presentation of the first volume to a richer level, offering an even broader array of artistic styles and media. Published in 2000, the first volume explored the diverse historical roots of the genre and introduced artists whose work recalled the South of the pre–civil rights era. This sequel brings the movement into the present, delving into the work of the current generation of artists who are creating a rich and complex form of contemporary art.
Breaking away from the stereotypes that identity folk art and the South with rural, isolated, static and agrarian ways of life, these pages unveil an art that embodies social change and continues to flourish at the dawn of a new century. Sure to challenge assumptions about art and American society, Souls Grown Deep is an indispensable resource for general readers and students interested in folk art, contemporary art, the South, African American culture, and American civilization.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications Tags: Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Tinwood Books, William Arnett
Edited by Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf
216 pages
Hardcover, clothbound
Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2011
Celebrating Thorton Dial’s contributions to American art, this book surveys the career of one of our most original contemporary artists, whose epic work tackles the most compelling social and political issues of our time. Born in poverty in Alabama, Dial has lived his entire life in the American South, and his art, informed by decades of struggle as a black working-class man, reveals a unique perspective on America’s most difficult and pervasive challenges, such as its long history of race and class conflict, the war in Iraq, and the 9/11 tragedy.
This monograph includes reproductions of 70 of Dial’s large-scale paintings, drawings and found object sculptures spanning twenty years of his artistic career. Drawing inspiration from the rich symbolic world of the black rural South and with no formal education, Dial has developed a truly distinctive and original style. Incorporating salvaged objects in his work-from plastic grave flowers and children’s toys to cow skulls and goat carcasses-he creates highly charged assemblages combined with turbulent fields of expressionistic painting. With commentary from historian David Driskell, cultural critic Greg Tate, and art historian Joanne Cubbs, this volume brings long-overdue recognition to Dial’s remarkable career and offers audiences an unprecedented look into the creative world of this important artist.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications Tags: Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, IMA, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Edited by William Arnett, John Beardsley, Alvia J. Wardlaw, and Jane Livingston
324 pages; 297 full-color illustrations
Hardcover, clothbound
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005
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.
Born in a cornfield to an unwed teenage mother, Dial grew up in rural Emelle, in Alabama’s western flatlands. He began full-time farm work at age five and managed to attend school only rarely. On the eve of World War II, he was sent to live with relatives in Bessemer, just outside Birmingham. There he married, raised a family, and worked for half a century in heavy industry, building highways, houses, and ultimately box-cars during a thirty-year stint at the Pullman-Standard plant.
Dial’s life encompasses many of the most consequential episodes in twentieth-century African American life—share-cropping in the Black Belt, migration from country to city, the upheavals of the civil rights era, and the ethnic conundrums of a rapidly changing postmodern America. As John Beardsley writes, “Dial’s life is inseparable from history because he has made it his business as an artist to be a historian. Dial lived history, then he represented it in paintings and sculptures. . . .”
From childhood on, Dial built “things” using whatever he could salvage, recycling even his own work to reuse materials in new creations. Dial referred to what he made only as ”things,” though late in life he found out that others called them “art.” Having developed during the era of racial segregation, Dial’s style is both personal and culturally rich, and it speaks with a resolute voice that was denied him through the years as a black factory worker.
In Dial’s art, intense surfaces, multilayered narratives, shifting compositional relationships, and a metaphysical concern with issues of recycling and ancestry exist hand in hand with an ironic, earthy wit and an almost religious determination to make art’s complexities and mysteries central to the human understanding of reality.
Dial works from within southern African American vernacular traditions, the same cultural impulse that gave birth to blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll. From these roots has emerged an epic, twenty-first-century art whose sophistication and ambition confound all aesthetic categories. Dial’s art transcends labels and bankrupts dichotomies between “fine” and “folk,”"inside” and “outside,” “high” art and “low.”
With illuminating essays by leading critics and art historians, an in-depth biography of the artist, and explorations of the southern black art traditions that underlie the artist’s visual vocabulary, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century maps new terrain for the study of American art.
This lavishly illustrated monograph has been published on the occasion of a groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tinwood Alliance/Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Thornton Dial in the 21st Century follows the artist’s explorations of interlinked topics, including a haunting suite of work about September 11, 2001; contemporary “history paintings” on life in America since the events of 9/11; homages to his friends, the women quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, their craft; a new type of “art about art” in which Dial responds to works from disparate cultural dialogues (including art by academically trained and vernacular artists); memories of vanishing ways of life and his childhood in the South; and evocations of human struggles for freedom.
Reproduced here are 118 recent paintings and sculptures—virtually all of the artist’s output from this five year period—as well as nearly 30 works on paper and a rich overview of Dial’s work from before 2000.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications Tags: book, Thornton Dial
Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett
336 Pages
546 Illustrations, 488 in full color
Hardcover, clothbound
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, black community in Alabama—have created hundreds ofquilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend tells the story of this town and its art.
Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’sBend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.
Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The residents’ ancestors worked the cotton plantations there, first as slaves, then for several generations as tenant farmers. In the 1930s Gee’s Bend was identified, perhaps wishfully, as “an Alabama Africa” and “another civilization.” Because this tightly knit society had remained mostly isolated from the surrounding world, the people of Gee’s Bend were considered living relics of nineteenth-century life. During the depths ofthe Great Depression, the federal government intervened to lift up Gee’s Bend—and photograph the”before” and “after.” Those images, by Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott, have become icons of prewar America, and are filled with the women whose quilts the book features.
Together with the exhibition organized jointly by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tinwood Alliance, the book illuminates three themes in American quilts: quilts as sophisticated design, quilts as vessels of cultural survival and continuity, and quilts as portraits of women’s identities. These women brought a uniquely local flavor to the one visual tradition widely practiced by Americans of every social class, ethnicity, religion, and region. They made an American pastime the literal fabric of their lives—an art that binds the individual’s imagination to family, friends, neighborhood, and the greater community.
The quiltmakers’ narratives brim with humor and resilience. Whether recalling their enslaved ancestors forced to walk from North Carolina to Alabama, a great-grandmother born in Africa, living off the land after their property was foreclosed, or crossing the river to march for the right to vote, the memories ofthese remarkable women match the eloquence and power of their quilts.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications
Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett
190 pages; 195 illustrations, 162 in full-color
Hardcover, clothbound
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2002
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small, remote, black community in Alabama—have created hundreds ofquilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend tells the story of this town and its art.
Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’sBend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants.
Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The residents’ ancestors worked the cotton plantations there, first as slaves, then for several generations as tenant farmers. In the 1930s Gee’s Bend was identified, perhaps wishfully, as “an Alabama Africa” and “another civilization.” Because this tightly knit society had remained mostly isolated from the surrounding world, the people of Gee’s Bend were considered living relics of nineteenth-century life. During the depths ofthe Great Depression, the federal government intervened to lift up Gee’s Bend—and photograph the”before” and “after.” Those images, by Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott, have become icons of prewar America, and are filled with the women whose quilts the book features.
Together with the exhibition organized jointly by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tinwood Alliance, the book illuminates three themes in American quilts: quilts as sophisticated design, quilts as vessels of cultural survival and continuity, and quilts as portraits of women’s identities. These women brought a uniquely local flavor to the one visual tradition widely practiced by Americans of every social class, ethnicity, religion, and region. They made an American pastime the literal fabric of their lives—an art that binds the individual’s imagination to family, friends, neighborhood, and the greater community.
The quiltmakers’ narratives brim with humor and resilience. Whether recalling their enslaved ancestors forced to walk from North Carolina to Alabama, a great-grandmother born in Africa, living off the land after their property was foreclosed, or crossing the river to march for the right to vote, the memories ofthese remarkable women match the eloquence and power of their quilts.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications
Edited by Paul Arnett, Joanne Cubbs, Eugene W. Metcalf Jr.
224 pages; 330 full-color reproductions
Tinwood Books/Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2006
This book and exhibition are part of a growing family of research projects about the African American community of Gee’s Bend,Alabama, and its quilts. Surrounded on three sides by a river, Gee’s Bend developed a distinctive local culture and quilt design aesthetic. In 2002 the inaugural exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend documented these quiltmaking achievements. 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.
The seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are mostly descendants of slaves, and for generations they worked the fields belonging to the local Pettway plantation. Quiltmakers there have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, with the oldest existing examples dating from the 1920s. Enlivened by a visual imagination that extends the expressive boundaries of the quilt genre, these astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of African American art.
The Quilts of Gee’s Bend brought the community to national prominence, presenting Gee’s Bend as a place that had nurtured a remarkable artistic phenomenon. Most importantly, the exhibition and accompanying books provided the quiltmakers with a new view of themselves as acclaimed artists working within a venerable tradition. Able to see their creations within abroad history of materials, patterns, and meanings, the women of Gee’s Bend suddenly had access to a wider expressive vocabulary in addition to their individual styles. The result was a renaissance in Gee’s Bend quiltmaking. Soon older quiltmakers who had stopped production were quilting again, and a younger generation was taking up the practice. About a third of the quilts in Gee’s Bend: The Architectecture of the Quilt have been made since the opening of the first exhibition four years ago. A uniquely American art tradition, formerly fading, has revivified itself.
Featuring essays by scholars and by the artists themselves,this volume considers the ways that materials influence the creative process and have played a central role in the evolution of Gee’s Bend quiltmaking; the significance of family and community in forging and sustaining quiltmaking practices; and the bold, improvisational aesthetic at the heart of the area’s patchwork tradition, with its stunning abstract designs and highly inventive “bending” of conventional quilt geometries. The book also tells the story of a quiltmaking heritage of five generations of women descended from a single matriarch, a slave named Dinah Miller. Finally, the book features the voices of three contemporary quiltmakers—Loretta P. Bennett, Mary Lee Bendolph, and Louisiana P. Bendolph. They describe their lives as quilt makers, the ideas behind their work, and the influence of other women—close relatives, distant ancestors, and other quiltmakers—with whom they have learned, borrowed, and shared.
Throughout, the underlying theme remains the “architecture of the quilt,” the ways Gee’s Bend quilts are conceived and built and how they ultimately become structures that organize identity and seal human relationships. An extraordinary yet previously unrecognized aspect of art history, the quilts of Gee’s Bend epitomize the continuing need to identify and preserve neglected areas of cultural accomplishment. They open the door to new cultural understandings.
Posted January 9, 2012 in Publications