Thornton Dial: From Bessemer to the Cosmos
Edel Assanti is pleased to present From Bessemer to the Cosmos, the first UK solo exhibition of large-scale paintings and assemblages by late American artist Thornton Dial (1928–2016), organised in collaboration with MARCH Gallery. Coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of the artist’s death in 2016, the exhibition brings together a selection of major, mostly unseen works produced during a pivotal decade of Dial’s career, from 1988 to 1998.
In the late summer of 1987, artist Lonnie Holley introduced his friend and collector, William S. Arnett, to Thornton Dial, marking the beginning of the first stage of Dial’s artistic career. Conversational in tone, the earliest works in From Bessemer to the Cosmos emerged from the rhythms of everyday life in Pipe Shop, Dial’s neighbourhood in Bessemer, Alabama. Rich Man, Poor Man, 1989, forms part of an early series of paintings depicting endemic architecture; the house structure and surrounding landscape are both the painting's subject and the setting in which it was made. By working with enamel paint and Splash Zone – an epoxy compound more commonly used in house repair – Dial was able to stretch the physicality of paint, pushing its surface closer to three-dimensionality. His approach quickly attracted attention from a broader and increasingly diverse viewership. Six years after that first meeting with Arnett, Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger opened simultaneously across the New Museum and the American Folk Art Museum in New York (1993).
The works in From Bessemer to the Cosmos narrate the African American experience across the twentieth century and beyond: from sharecropping in the Black Belt and the Great Migration, to the struggles and triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and complexities of identity in a rapidly shifting postmodern America. Painted the same year as his major exhibition Image of the Tiger, Racking and Hanging and Stacking, 1993, a dense and abstract composition of paint and cut tin, wire and rope, is a clear example of Dial’s ability to fuse the aesthetic and materiality of the African American yard show with the patterning and radiance of the quilt. The frenetic sculptural surface presents a worksite populated by camouflaged tigers, dogs, birds, and figures all busy doing the laborious work required for the modern economy. An homage to those anonymous workers, the piece serves as a reminder that the town of Bessemer was founded to take advantage of cheap labour in the post-slavery era.
By all accounts, Dial’s artistic trajectory was unusual, especially considering the complex realities of class and racial disparities in America. Working since the age of five, Dial, in his own words, undertook almost "every kind of work a man can do”: he spent three decades as a metalworker for the Pullman Standard railroad plant in Bessemer, Alabama, and worked in a variety of skilled trades such as house painting, bricklaying, pipe fitting, and carpentry. These experiences, together with vernacular traditions that elude formal institutions – the yard shows of the American South, patchwork quilting, and the gospel church – coalesced into a visual lexicon uniquely his own. By the late 1990s, Dial’s focus was shifting towards representing the intangible; in 1997’s Cover of the World (People Ask for Flowers While They Live), an ascendant star hovers at the composition’s centre, surrounded by patchwork squares of lilac, rust and pale yellow, plastic flowers and painted carpet. The gridded framework anticipates the aerial perspective of some of Dial’s later work, mapping Southern landscapes, whilst also aesthetically demonstrating Dial’s proximity to Black quilt making; specifically, the works made by women in the community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, with whom Dial had a profound connection.
Despite inherent obstacles and persistent misunderstandings, over the ten years charted by this exhibition Dial’s work grew in scale, material complexity, and thematic ambition, employing animistic symbols and illuminating titles to convey both autobiographical narratives and broader histories of Black experience. From Bessemer to the Cosmos encircles a critical period of Dial’s practice where his gaze – previously focused on his immediate community and surroundings – expanded to encompass humanity at large, from his home in Bessemer, Alabama to the edges of the cosmos and the confines of life itself.
About Thornton Dial
Thornton Dial (b.1928, Emelle, AL, U.S., d.2016, McCalla, AL, U.S.), lived and worked in Bessemer, Alabama, U.S. Dial has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums and institutions, including the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL, Samford University Art Gallery, Birmingham, AL and Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL (2022–23); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2020); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2016); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (2011); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA (2011); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2005); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1993); American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY (1993); and was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York, NY (2000).
Dial’s work is held in the collections of many prestigious institutions, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others.
