Thornton Dial American, 1928-2016
"If everybody understand one another, wouldn’t nobody make art. Art is something to open your eyes. Art is for understanding."
- Thornton Dial
Artistic giant Thornton Dial - who never learned to read or write - rose to the pinnacle of contemporary art history over a thirty year trajectory that began as he approached 60 years of age.
Thornton Dial was born into a sharecropping family in rural Alabama, on the eve of the Great Depression. He experienced the trauma and tumult of both Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights movement. Profoundly influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dial used art to confront issues of racial oppression in the United States, developing an allegorical style that was abstracted but narrative, conveying concerns both personal and universal.
His large, bold works, with incisive titles and themes of race and class, captivated the art world through sophisticated content and an aesthetic that defied stereotypes of “folk.” Dial bridged the worlds of Black vernacular self-taught artists and the contemporary mainstream. He was a conduit between nineteenth-century-born artists like Bill Traylor; African American quilters who had, for too long, gone unrecognized as artists; and a younger generation of Black creatives seeking a way forward.
Dial lived to see his work be acquired by some of the most revered museums in the United States and become relevant to the mainstream art world in unprecedented ways. As the art world increasingly embraced him, Dial used his voice to raise serious questions about its long-standing hierarchies and inequities. He became emblematic of a shifting southern landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — as the deeply rooted vision of Black Americans revealed its tremendous power.
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Sleeping Giants
Herbert Creecy, Thornton Dial, Sam Glankoff 18 May - 1 Jul 2023Thanks to new ways of thinking about art history, especially due to the influence of postmodernist critical ideas, in recent decades, the overlooked or little-known legacies of some of modern art’s most remarkable sleeping giants have been rediscovered and are being appreciated anew. Now honored — and aroused — these artists’ creative spirits and the ideas that inspired them gave rise to distinctive bodies of work for which a new generation of art historians, curators, critics, and collectors have been making room in modern art’s familiar canon and in the broader story of its long, multifaceted evolution.Read more
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The Alchemists
Co-Curated by Seph Rodney & Donovan Johnson 3 Mar - 29 Apr 2023“This is the only real concern of the artist: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” — James Baldwin How is blackness — as...Read more
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Ruckus | Review: "The Alchemists" at Johnson Lowe Gallery
By Danelle Bernsten May 4, 2023Co-curated by Donovan Johnson and Seph Rodney, the Johnson Lowe Gallery’s magnetic group exhibition of twenty-nine Atlanta-based, American, and/or international Black artists such as Renee...Read more -
Burnaway | The Alchemists at Johnson Lowe Gallery
by Folasade Ologundudu May 4, 2023Curated by Donovan Johnson and Seph Rodney at the new Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, The Alchemists brings together an amalgamation of works that unearths...Read more -
Frieze | 'The Alchemists' Ritualizes Black Culture
by Lisa Yin Zhang April 4, 2023Before we set foot in the gallery, Mark Bradford’s large-scale canvas, Playing Castles (2022), greets us through a window. It reads as a tortured aerial...Read more -
ArtsATL | Review: “The Alchemists” at Johnson Lowe is a groundbreaking, must-see show
By Jerry Cullum March 27, 2023The Alchemists, on display through April 29, represents a spectacular new beginning for the renamed and reconceived Johnson Lowe Gallery. At the same time, it...Read more -
Atlanta Journal Constitution | "Art As Transformation is at the heart of an impressive group show"
Felicia Feaster | ‘The Alchemists’ at Johnson Lowe Gallery brings together Atlanta-based artists those outside the city in challenging, rewarding exhibition. March 14, 2023‘The Alchemists’ at Johnson Lowe Gallery brings together Atlanta-based artists those outside the city in challenging, rewarding exhibition | Atlanta Journal Constitution | Felicia FeasterRead more