HOUSTON, TEXAS.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will present a major exhibition of the work of Thornton Dial, Sr., from September 25, 2005 through January 8, 2006. Dial, 76, is an artist whose relentless engagement with history, world events, ideas, and art-making is reflected in drawings, watercolors, and monumental assemblages that fuse the possibilities of painting and sculpture. His remarkable style of reportage draws on the traditions of African-American storytelling, and has earned the artist significant critical attention since his work was first publicly presented in the early 1980s. Thornton Dial in the 21st Century will present work done since 2000 by this prolific artist; most of it has not yet been presented to the public.

“Thornton Dial, Sr., is one of the great artist-storytellers of our time,” commented Peter C. Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “Like the photojournalists of the 1930s, who documented the human toll of the Great Depression, or painters such as Jacob Lawrence, who witnessed the great migrations of African-Americans from the farms to the cities in the 1940s, Thornton Dial chronicles today’s world, expressing the basic truths of modern life, from the perspective of a life spent in the deep South. He is a self-taught genius whose vision is that of a prophet or shaman.”

“For more than half a century, the MFAH has been building what is now the largest collection of African-American art in any major museum,” commented Alvia Wardlaw, curator of modern and contemporary art at the MFAH. “It is especially gratifying that we can give voice to Thornton Dial’s singular vision against the backdrop of those myriad stories and experiences, and in the context of our ongoing commitment to broadening the dialogue about modern and contemporary art.”

About the Exhibition: All of Thornton Dial’s work emerges from a relentless mining of his own experience and of the events, great and small, of our time. His use of materials – clothing, bedding, window screens, fencing, cow bones, corn stalks, scrap metal, crockery shards, stuffed animals, rope carpet, and unusual combinations of Polymers and paints – renders his work by turns raw and lyrical. Dial’s titles are both poetic and matter-of-fact: The Blood of Hard Times, Equal Opportunity (Mosquitoes Don’t Discriminate), Memories of the Ladies That Gave Us the Good Life, Valley Creek Disaster Area, Shacktown, Looking for the Taliban, Peace Talks. As curator Jane Livingston notes, “Thornton Dial achieves the monumental and the poetic out of the everyday. Like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg before him, he has absorbed the vernacular of the rural south and transformed it: in Dial’s case, into stories and histories of profound power and an uneasy beauty.”

The exhibition will be organized around the themes that prevail in Dial’s most recent work: Old Alabama, which presents his recurring concern with the realities of poverty, exploitation, and the disappearance of the agrarian way of life in the South; Women, which conveys Dial’s abiding love for the community of women who raised him and for the women around him; Gee’s Bend, about the women quilters of that rural Alabama town; 9/11, a cycle of several works done from memory after seeing the site of the World Trade Center attacks; Life After 9/11, about society, politics, and the war in Iraq; and Art and Art History, which includes paintings that Dial has done in response to specific works of art, including those by William Merritt Chase and Joseph Beuys.

Dial tends to work in cycles on subjects that he might explore intensively for a period and then revisit years later. The Gee’s Bend series is a tribute to the women quilt-makers of that tiny Alabama town. “Dial grew up with quilts around him; everyone he knew made them,” Dr. Wardlaw said. The composition of each work is evocative of a quilt, but each has its own mood, and together they create a meditation on the lives of women struggling to retain their traditions and rural way of life. Several paintings titled Strange Fruit are classical-seeming still lifes inspired by another of Dial’s favored sources, the painting traditions of the Old Masters, but their titles are borrowed from a 1939 Billie Holiday ballad about lynching (“Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze; Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”). The Old Water is a freestanding tableau that depicts water running below and great, black birds hovering above, as if waiting their turn to drink – a visual metaphor that recalls a time when blacks were prohibited to drink the same water as whites. Regardless of subject matter, Dial’s art never strays far from his own sensibility or experience.

About the Artist: Dial was born in 1928 in Emelle, Alabama, a tiny town in rural Sumter County. The essential facts of Dial’s life reflect the passage of the deep South from the legacies of slavery through urbanization, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and the harsh economic and political realities of the post-Civil Rights era. Dial belongs to the last of a generation of African-American artists who were raised in a racially segregated society. He worked at various skilled jobs and eventually, in the second half-century of his life, found his voice in painting, drawing, sculpture, and “assembling” unique works of art. His art is joyous, angry, funny, and profound.

Dial never knew his father, and his mother was very young when he was born. When he was a small child, he worked as a farmhand; at the age of nine he left school and moved, with his brother Arthur, to industrial Bessemer, Alabama, near Birmingham, to live with his great aunt Sara Lockett. Throughout his teens, Dial worked: first at an icehouse and a brickyard, later at whatever work he could find – as a housepainter, carpenter, pipe fitter. At 22, he took a job as an ironworker at the Pullman Standard boxcar factory, where he would work for 30 years. He and his wife, Clara, raised five children. He continues to live and make his art in a neighborhood of Bessemer called Pipe Shop. Two of his sons are also artists, and operate Dial Metal Patterns, the family’s welded-furniture business.

As Dial himself says, he was always making things – sculptures and objects, many of them intended as satire or commentary. Initially regarding the works as simply private creative expressions, for years he buried the objects that he made in his yard. It was not until the early 1980s, with confidence gained from the support he had from other local artists and patrons, that Dial resolved to share his work, and he began to attract attention. Increasingly, the metalwork that Dial was doing as part of the furniture practice led him to experiment more freely with his own sculptures and assemblages.

Dial first gained recognition as a major artist in the late 1980s, with the growing interest in so-called African-American vernacular art. His work has continued to earn critical praise, for its formal inventiveness, its emotional power, and its unique _expression of the African-American experience in the South. Thornton Dial was featured in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and his works are included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C., the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1993, Dial had concurrent solo exhibitions in New York City, at the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum for Contemporary Art.