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.

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.

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.

 Lewis was born in 1940, the son of sharecroppers, outside of Troy in east Alabama, roughly an hour south of the state capital of Montgomery. Inspired by the mushrooming civil rights movement, he attended Fisk University and organized sit-ins at segregated Nashville lunch counters.

Dial was born in Emelle, a tiny burg near the Mississippi line in western Alabama’s Black Belt region, so named for its black soil that supported cotton plantations before the Civil War. He was working in the fields by age 6 or 7, and left school at age 12. After the death of the great-grandmother who raised him, he moved to be with relatives in Bessemer, near Birmingham, working for many years as a welder for the railway car-maker Pullman Standard Company.

Throughout his life, Dial made “things,” usually sculptural constructions from found objects. He came to encode these pieces with increasingly sophisticated social observations and messages that received belated recognition in the late 1980s.

Dial was recognized as one of folk art’s leading lights when Lewis selected him to create a public artwork in Atlanta commissioned by supporters who sought to honor the congressman’s civil rights achievements.

“The Bridge,” a 42-foot-long outdoor assemblage by Dial, was dedicated in 2005 in Freedom Park at Freedom Parkway and Ponce de Leon Avenue. It alludes to the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” protest Lewis helped lead across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

A few miles away at the High, “Hard Truths” is comprised of 59 wall-mounted assemblages, free-standing sculptures and drawings that unblinkingly address issues such as racial oppression in America and the marginalization of the underclass.

“I love his work,” Lewis said. “People classify him as a folk artist, but I think it’s more than folk art. To me, it’s almost classic.”

Lewis also commented …

On what he connects to in Dial’s work: “He takes ordinary, what some people would consider throwaway, materials and makes it some of the most colorful and some of the most moving pieces. He makes it real, he brings it home to you.”

On what they like to talk about: “We talk about growing up in Alabama, not so much about the art. I think he has this deep and abiding feeling that his art speaks for itself and he doesn’t need to elaborate on it. So you have to sort of bring it out of him.”

On what Dial told him about “The Bridge”: “He said it’s like the old and the new, it’s traveling from one place to another place, and along the way, you come in contact with different parts of human life. And that we’re still crossing a bridge. He was saying in effect: This is one bridge, but we have more bridges to cross.”

On if he relates to the sculptural figure crossing “Bridge”: “I can identify with it. I think it captures the essence of what I have been all about, what I’ve tried to do.”

On some of his other favorite artists: “I have several pieces from different (folk) artists: R.A. Miller, the minister in northwest Georgia (the Rev. Howard Finster), a piece by Bernice Sims (an Alabama memory painter known for depictions of civil rights protests), Mose T. (Tolliver). … I admire them all but also love (Romare) Bearden and (Jacob) Lawrence.”

On if Dial shares Lewis’ sense of hope, despite the hard truths his art addresses: “Oh yeah, he’s not hostile or bitter. He’s a very positive human being. What he’s been able to do with his art is capture the essence of what he saw, what he felt. And to a significant degree, he is telling stories, as part of our history, part of our past. It also tells us something about the future.”

On Dial’s legacy: “These (large sculptural) works of art of his belong in a museum, preserved for generations, because they tell us the story of a particular period in the history of America and especially the American South.”

“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.)

Rauschenberg wasn’t the only one to acknowledge vernacular influence. Rebecca Solnit notes, in her book Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, that when curator William Seitz came to San Francisco in quest of art for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 “Art of Assemblage” show, artist Bruce Conner took him to look at arrangements in a Chinese laundry and an African-American junk store.

Such a book might help us make sense of the remarkable resemblance between Dial’s work and the Rauschenberg assemblage in the High’s “Fast Forward>>Modern Moments 1913-2013” show. It might also help us understand how Dial, a man practiced in carpentry, welding and a host of other skills, could have spent a lifetime creating found-object assemblages before being discovered in 1987 by another now-legendary black assemblage artist, Lonnie Holley, who brought Dial to the attention of the fabled art patron William Arnett.

It would also help us contextualize the slow ascent of Dial to global fame, from Roberta Griffin’s exhibitions at Kennesaw State University in the early 1990s to New York’s New Museum shortly thereafter to the present 20-year retrospective, via two 1996 Cultural Olympiad exhibitions in Atlanta and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. (The dazzlingly diverse directions of Dial’s work in the past decade and a half have been, to some degree, an effect of his exposure to new experiences and aspects of the world since his star has risen.)

At this point, Dial’s status as contemporary artist is secure and the environment out of which he arose is only a matter for scholarship. But that scholarship, which thus far has been deployed all too fragmentarily, is essential. Mr. Dial (I’ll explain the importance of that “Mr.” in a moment) is best thought of as fitting into the same categories of art as the wide range of contemporary artists with whom he is sometimes compared. The line of lynched crows (blackened rags) in “Green Pastures: The Birds That Didn’t Learn How to Fly,” for example, is visual shorthand for the past consequences of racism that would not be out of place in a theory-laden work by an art-school-educated artist.

Dial happens to be a conceptually minded, visually oriented intellectual who was deprived of formal education except for the practical skills that allowed him to both imagine and create elaborate objects that don’t fall apart after they have been constructed. Like the best artists of any cultures, including cultures that don’t call their object-makers “artists,” he has absorbed the visual and conceptual lessons of the examples available to him and used them to create works that have a powerful emotional and intellectual impact.

He did this despite a lifetime in which the honorific “Mr.” was usually denied to men of his social class and race. Hence the hardness of the truths he expresses symbolically in works that are frequently dark in emotional tone as well as palette. Abstract though it may appear, Dial’s work is intensely political in its own way, telling the story of the rise of African-Americans out of rural poverty and oppression to levels of status and recognition that can still remain more tenuous than the mainstream mythos is willing to admit.

Dial first came to public attention with densely pictorial works composed of oil and enamel paint on rope carpet, typically including the fluidly rendered image of a tiger as the symbol for black masculinity. Since then, his paintings and assemblage sculptures have incorporated found objects in ways that communicate both conceptually and viscerally: it takes only the patience to look closely for the viewer to be affected by the horrific details of the complex tangle of metal and mannequin heads in such works as “Victory in Iraq.”

Dial’s range of subject matter and visual strategies can be overwhelming. There are evocations of the oppressive quality of rural poverty that look like a hybrid of Italian arte povera’s use of commonplace objects and the pointed social satire of contemporary black artist David Hammons. An homage to “The Art of Alabama” juxtaposes a towering example of African-American yard art with the classical inheritance as represented by a statue of Pandora painted bright yellow (a statue that, incidentally, almost certainly comes from the popular genre of outdoor statuary also known as “yard art”).

A large part of Dial’s work is as dense and filled with darkness as the subject matter he tackles, from the economic and social implications of “Mercedes-Benz Comes to Alabama” and “Monument to the Minds of the Little Negro Steelworkers” to the aftermath of tragedies from mine disasters to 9/11. The tangles of cords and metal and plastic dolls (plus a few mummified animals) that symbolize the world’s entanglements aren’t the whole story, however. The metal-framework crosses and hanging scraps of cloth of “Crosses to Bear (Armageddon)” evoke the World Trade Center succinctly and sparely, in a sculpture that is a forerunner of Dial’s recent transition from vast, all-encompassing structures to assemblages in which a minimal number of objects have a maximum visual and emotional impact.

More importantly, there is a skeptically visionary side to Dial that is expressed in the complex exuberance of such works as “The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle,” in which the dominant colors are vivid yellows and reds and symbols ranging from plastic flowers to a cloth-draped doll suggest the emergence of burgeoning life. The redemptive power of nature is set alongside the sacrifice of a black Christ in “The Dogwood Tree,” but by and large Dial’s symbols of spiritual liberation are more abstract, as in “Clouds Moving in the Sky, We Wake Up in Darkness and Look for Daylight,” where the title is as much a work of art as the elegantly composed work itself.

Dial’s accomplishment had to wend its way through the thickets of categories of folk art, fine art and still contested questions of race and class and respect that badly need to be rethought in less claustrophobic terms.

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.

Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

www.edlingallery.com

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.

Like many folk artists, Dial is a master at using the materials at hand, employing baby dolls and Barbies, scraps of fabric, metal paint cans and even the occasional animal corpse to tell his story. His assemblage paintings are three-dimensional riots of energy-packed surface with all of those found objects often working in concert with a color palette that ranges from sooty blacks and mournful grays to glorious reds, yellows and oranges in a room focused on the hopeful, spiritual side of Dial’s vision.

More often, the work is scathing, as in the large sculpture “Everybody’s Welcome in Peckerwood City,” a kind of stage set that lampoons the false front of Southern benevolence and good manners.

On one side of this wooden facade of a Southern home — the size of a child’s playhouse or a stage set — is a welcome mat, but if you look closely, there is blood leaking from beneath the exterior walls. Walk behind that friendly facade, and there is a chaotic tangle of wood and wires and destruction. It is a concise and chilling peek into the vantage of a black man growing up in the South, where threat can lurk even behind the most pleasant surfaces.

But Dial looks outward, too, to the long shadow Sept. 11 casts over the entire country and to global politics, addressed in a humorous, monumental array of sculptures whose centerpiece is “Driving to the End of the World: Sheik,” a work flanked by contorted hunks of auto parts. In “Sheik,” an Arab figure in a headdress conveys succinctly our enslavement to modern man’s exoskeleton — the car — that locks us in a crippling dependency with faraway nations.

But then, in a significant change of tone, Dial switches gears on the exhibition’s second floor. A gallery is dominated by the artist’s light, sherbet-colored drawings that often depict women in almost randy, swooping, giddy terms. Often nude and brimming with life, their forms fill the drawings.

In the compositionally inventive “Last Trip Home (Diana’s Funeral)” from 1997, Dial depicts Princess Diana’s funeral. He captures her visage with a minimum of details — that distinctive hair and downcast eyes. Diana’s face dominates a landscape where church, grave and wedding veil are combined into one sheltering structure. A gray swath below Diana represents the masses of her faceless admirers. Tender, quiet, this and other drawings stand in stark contrast to Dial’s incensed canvases, but they inspire a deeper appreciation for the depths of this fascinating man’s interests and aesthetics.

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

www.edlingallery.com

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.

Born in Emelle, in the heart of western Alabama’s Black Belt region (so named for its black soil that supported cotton plantations before the Civil War), he was working in the fields by age 6. He left school behind at age 12, still in the third grade.

After the death of the great-grandmother who raised him, Dial and a half brother went to live with a relative in Bessemer. There he worked a series of blue-collar jobs that enhanced his natural handiness and propensity to transform scavenged items into new “things.” Then he began a long career as a metalworker at the Pullman boxcar factory.

When those things overflowed the home of his growing family, his wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t dump the “junk.” Even his kids sometimes scratched their heads over what Dad was creating on any given day.

Discouraged, Thornton Dial buried many of his early creations.

“When you start doing something and don’t nobody pay attention to it, you’ll throw it away, too,” he explained during a visit to the High for opening weekend festivities.

Dial’s biography is far from those of the artists included in the High Museum exhibit next door in the Wieland Pavilion, “Fast Forward: Modern Moments, 1913-2013.” One artist in that show, the late Robert Rauschenberg, did, however, take some cues for his found-object pieces from African-American “yard show” assemblages he saw as a boy in Port Arthur, Texas. Ditto Dial in Alabama.

The debate over where the self-taught artist fits in the art world firmament goes back at least to 1993, when Dial was the subject of major simultaneous New York exhibitions at the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum for Contemporary Art. With ecstatic reviews coming in, Dial seemed poised for liftoff.

But his trajectory was almost immediately interrupted when “60 Minutes” aired a segment that suggested white Atlanta art dealer William Arnett financially took advantage of black self-taught artists. A believer in the dealer t0 this day, Dial, who appeared on camera only briefly, found Morley Safer’s questions condescending.

The artist spoke volumes about the report in a large, wall-mounted assemblage, “Strange Fruit: Channel 42,” one of the darkest pieces included in “Hard Truths.” In it, a male figure clad in white shirt and blood-red tie hangs from a TV antenna, his mouth a circle of anguish recalling Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Below the lynched figure are rows of ripped cloths — rags being a recurring metaphor in the artist’s work for people and things discarded by society.

Made fragile in recent years by a stroke and other maladies, Dial had a hard time discussing “Strange Fruit,” or, for that matter, any of the “Hard Truths” works during his High visit.

Now requiring a wheelchair, he was rolled into the Chambers Wing by 57-year-old son Richard Dial and trailed by six other family members, several of whom live with and help care for him in Bessemer.

Strikingly handsome still, he sported a navy suit, a starched white shirt and a warm smile. His almond-hued eyes made frequent contact, and when he smiled, which he did often, something of Rhett Butler’s gambler spirit was on exhibit.

But even in days of better health, Dial, who had hardly visited a museum before his work was shown in them and isn’t conversant in the high-flown dialogue spoken there, was content to let his art speak for itself. On this morning, he answered many questions, admittedly posed by an unfamiliar questioner in an unfamiliar setting, with “Right.”

Asked about the “60 Minutes” report, he responded cheerily, “Well, I felt good. I had did it, you know what I’m saying?”

Richard patiently tried to rephrase the reporter’s question. “He’s talking about the ‘60 Minutes’ and how they had all the negative things that kept going on and on,” the son nudged.

“I understand,” Dial said, without elaborating further.

But Joanne Cubbs, the Indianapolis Museum of Art adjunct American art curator who organized “Hard Truths,” had plenty to say about the report.

“They not only distorted the relationship between [the dealer and artists], but they made Dial appear, and here’s the real racist text of the piece, as if he was a bumbling, inarticulate fool who was making work that was not art,” the sunny curator said with sudden fire. “This assault changed the course of Dial’s career. Everything evaporated that had been on the menu. He went into an extended period where he was working in isolation.”

Still, Dial was featured in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2000, and individual collectors from both the folk and contemporary sides of the art fence never stopped pursuing his work. While drawings on paper can be scored for as low as $2,000, some museum-worthy constructions come with price tags in the neighborhood of $100,000, according to Folk Fest founder Steve Slotin.

As well, the artist is now represented in the permanent collections of leading museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the High.

Yet, if it’s taken nearly 20 years for Dial finally to achieve another moment with “Hard Truths,” Cubbs believes it’s more than time healing all wounds. She credits a greater openness over those years by museum-goers and collectors, dealers and curators to accept art outside the mainstream, applying fewer distancing labels.

“One of the interesting things about this exhibition is that from the very beginning of planning we didn’t talk about Dial as a folk, self-taught or even an African-American artist,” the curator said. “We talked about him as a contemporary artist or as an American artist.”

Taken on their own terms, the works resonate with Dial’s fierce intelligence and reveal his remarkable mastery of materials. They cover topics including racial oppression, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Iraq war, 9/11 and, in the show’s most stirringly intimate piece, the 2005 death of his wife, Clara Mae Murrow.

“His work is meant to inspire,” Cubbs explained, “not push or prod.”

In the late 1980s, after Dial met Arnett through a fellow artist, the art world finally began paying attention to his works that mix personal, art historical and metaphysical themes to differing degrees.

Richard Dial recalled some early tour bus visitors who were brought to tears by an MLK-themed construction of his father’s.

“They were laying down on the ground just crying, they were so moved,” Richard said. “Now at that point you start to think [maybe there’s something special here]. That was the time when everybody started taking him a lot more seriously.”

As a teenager, Richard and his two brothers, who’d rather have been playing basketball, begrudged it when their Dad made them help in the shop. Life came full circle a few years ago when the sons carved out an area of Dial Metal Patterns, their fabrication shop, to provide their father a work space where they could keep eyes on him.

Ailing at times from the mileage of being 84, Dial nonetheless goes to the studio nearly every day.

He’s got work to do: The reception for “Hard Times” has sparked two new series, one on natural disasters, which Cubbs said are metaphors for political upheavals, and one on rebirth.

That last topic raised the question of what the artist would like his legacy to be.

A quizzical expression swept across his chiseled face.

So the query was reposed: How would he like people to think of him after he’s gone?

“Think good of me,” Thornton Dial said, this time without hesitation.

David Byrne and Bill Arnett

On October 3, 2012 David Byrne and St. Vincent (Annie Clarke) took time out from their “Love This Giant” tour to visit the Souls Grown Deep Foundation warehouse in Atlanta.