You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning and, though the details are fuzzy, you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar.
Another humpback washed ashore at my cousins farm, time to dig a hole for burial so it’s skeleton can be kept in tact to be studied. (20 footer too, gonna be a big hole!)
Representation matters, so this month, I’m highlighting one important black historical figure that we didn’t get the whitewashed version of–or any version of–in school growing up.
Thornton Dial
Pablo Picasso, one of history’s greatest painters, once said, “African art? Never heard of it,” so fuck that guy, basically. We learned plenty about Picasso in school, though (OMG did you know that he painted serious portraits before he got all wAcKy with his art), and I can’t help but think that at least some of that time could have been spent studying artists like Thornton Dial instead.
Dial, who passed away at the age of 87 last month, contributed a staggering amount to American art and culture. The son of sharecroppers from Alabama, Dial’s first artistic inspiration came from his uncle, who would make sculptures from things laying around in the yard.
Though Dial had no formal education and worked in heavy industry for much of his life, he spent his spare time making art. Dial’s unique blend of sculpture and painting, inspired by artistic traditions of the black south, began captivating audiences in the 1980′s, and he became a fixture of the American art scene.
It wasn’t as though he was just making things to make them, either. Dial’s artwork is profoundly political, and pulls few punches. The kinds of materials he pulled together in his assemblages–scrap metal, bones, plastic grave flowers, rope, and the like–speak to his larger message about the violence of poverty, the travesty of homelessness, the injustices visited upon the black South in America.
I’ve written before about how my favorite kind of art is art made from other art, and that idea is sort of flipped on its head with Dial’s work–art made not from other art, but from the everyday, the broken, the cast off. There’s something important in that.
I am not qualified to speak to Dial’s struggle, nor the larger ones he portrayed in his art, but I should have been required to learn about it.
It’s super important to amplify black voices and influences, so please go follow @theshrillest on Twitter, who has taught me so much about Dial, art, race, and more.
(PS: Dial also drew and painted, besides making sculpture.)
Thornton Dials Cousin was Ronald Lockett, his first retrospective is on display at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. His career was short, as he died at the age of 32 due to HIV/AIDS related pneumonia. Locketts work follows the tradition of found objects and largely went unrecognized during his lifetime. Admission is free.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes last week and to everyone who took the time to celebrate with me last week and over the weekend! It was a blast! #latergram #dirtythirty (at Tennis & Racquet Club)
