16 Facts About Thornton Dial

Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s.

Thornton Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Thornton Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.

Thornton Dial was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie Bell, on a former cotton plantation in Emelle, Alabama, where relatives in his extended family worked as sharecroppers.

Thornton Dial lived with his mother until he was around three when Dial and his half-brother Arthur moved in with their second cousin, Buddy Jake Dial, who was a farmer.

When Thornton Dial moved in with Buddy Jake, he farmed and learned about the sculptures that Buddy Jake made from items lying around the yard, an experience that influenced him.

Thornton Dial grew up in poverty and without the presence of his father.

In 1940, when he was twelve, Thornton Dial moved to Bessemer, Alabama.

In 1987 Thornton Dial met Lonnie Holley, an artist who introduced Dial to Atlanta collector and art historian William Arnett.

Thornton Dial is the founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of African American art.

Thornton Dial's work has been continually heralded in international cultural institutions and large survey exhibitions, such as the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Over time, the context for Thornton Dial's work has expanded to showcase the political and social responsiveness of his artwork, expressing "ideas about black history, slavery, racial discrimination, urban and rural poverty, industrial or environmental collapse, and spiritual salvation".

In reviews of this exhibition, Thornton Dial received unprecedented recognition in the national press, which, for the first time, positioned him as a bonafide contemporary artist.

Thornton Dial's work has sometimes been described as "outsider art", a term that attempts to cover the product of everyone from naive painters like Grandma Moses to institutionalized lost souls like Martin Ramirez and full-bore obsessives like Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor.

Thornton Dial invokes the history of the American rural South throughout much of his work.

In 1993, Thornton Dial's work was the subject of a large exhibition that was presented simultaneously at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Thornton Dial's work has been exhibited throughout the United States since 1990.