Thornton Dial (1928–2016), Remembering the Road, 1992
Tin, rope carpet, cloth, vinyl, carpet, wire screen, feed sacks, enamel, and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood, 85 1/2 x 121 x 3 1/2 in.; Private Collection
A scene from the past is frozen in the memory of a tiger made of rusted tin. Silhouetted against a contemporary city, people walk in both directions along a road, each participant touching the next. An elderly woman holds the hand of her son, "the baseball player, trying to go further, his mother whispering 'Go ahead'." In the center is the "hard-headed goat" who "will go anywhere," says Dial, "to the top of the mountain where other animals are afraid." On the left, two young girls are "high-stepping" in unison, emulating the old woman's manner. Dial explains that they are "hard-headed girls following the hard-headed goat. They ain't ashamed and they ain't afraid." The road is an abstract tiger that supports the walkers. Nesting and flying birds, concealed by a white haze, affirm the walkers' eventual success.
Born in Emelle, Alabama, Thornton Dial (1928 - 2016) is one of the major figures in late 20th-early 21st century American Art. His large-scale paintings, drawings, and found-object sculptures grapple with many of the most consequential episodes in twentieth-century African American life—sharecropping in the Black Belt, migration from country to city, the upheavals of the civil rights era, and a rapidly changing post-industrial America. In his art, intense surfaces, multilayered narratives, shifting compositional relationships, and a metaphysical concern with issues of recycling and ancestry exist hand in hand with an ironic, earthy wit and an almost religious determination to make art’s complexities and mysteries central to the human understanding of reality.
Thornton Dial’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Learn more about Thornton Dial here.
