Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper

Thornton Dial

Thornton Dial

Thoughts on Paper

Edited by Bernard L. Herman

Foreword by Emily Kass

Published in Association with the

ACKLAND ART MUSEUM

by the

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

This publication is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, by the David G. Frey Expendable American Art Fund, and by the William Hayes Ackland Trust.

© 2011 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Manufactured in Canada. Designed and set by Kimberly Bryant in Caecilia and Aller types.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dial, Thornton.

Thornton Dial: thoughts on paper / edited by Bernard L. Herman;

foreword by Emily Kass.

  p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3529-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Dial, Thornton—Themes, motives. I. Herman, Bernard L., 1951–

II. Title. III. Title: Thoughts on paper.

N6537.D4468A4 2011b

741.973—dc23                            2011031533

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword

     EMILY KASS

Acknowledgments

     BERNARD L. HERMAN

Thornton Dial, Thoughts on Paper

     BERNARD L. HERMAN

Expressionist Dial

Or, Thinking around Canonicity

     COLIN RHODES

Every Drawing That I Do, I Think about the Lord

Thornton Dial’s Journey of Faith

     GLENN HINSON

We All Grew Up in That Life

Thornton Dial’s Sexual Politics on Paper

     JUAN LOGAN

Thornton Dial’s Continuing Creative Practice

Drawings and Related Works, 1991–2011

     CARA ZIMMERMAN

Contributors

Index

Foreword

In 2008, Bernie Herman, George Tindall Professor of American Studies at UNC–Chapel Hill and a recognized expert in material culture, came to the Ackland with an idea. He proposed an exhibition and publication that would examine the early drawings of Thornton Dial. I was intrigued by the prospect of studying a focused body of work as a means to better understand the creative process of an artist known for his very diverse and unconventional use of materials, frequently on a monumental scale. But I was also impressed by Professor Herman’s deep commitment to engage scholars with differing perspectives in examining the work, while at the same time including his students in the extended process of research and planning. In preparation for the exhibition and publication, students attended sessions with me and other staff at the Ackland to learn about museum practice and to discuss their ideas. They prepared conceptual outlines and generated framing questions. Undoubtedly, the highlight for them was the chance to travel to Alabama and meet Dial and to observe his approach to the creative process, including the actual execution of a drawing. The resulting collaboration among Ackland staff, leading scholars in the United States and abroad, students, and the artist Thornton Dial has created and shaped this publication and the exhibition.

The Ackland Art Museum is well known for its extensive collection of works on paper, and in particular its fine collection of drawings. Thus it is particularly appropriate that the museum would embrace this exploration of drawing as a touchstone of the creative process. While this book focuses on Dial’s early drawings, the ideas presented here have implications for other artists whose work has been characterized as folk or outsider art and thereby set apart and often ignored in serious art historical study. The project suggests a framework for reconsidering works of art by other artists who for too long have been defined by these same limiting categories.

Several individuals and organizations must be singled out for thanks. We wish to express our appreciation to the National Endowment for the Arts, which provided support to initiate the exhibition and book at a critical time. We would also like to thank David Frey for creating the David G. Frey Expendable American Art Fund at UNC–Chapel Hill. Without additional support from this fund, the project would not have been possible. We are also grateful to the Arnett family, and in particular Bill Arnett, who has embraced the project, spending many hours with our staff and scholars, making research materials available, and generously donating six of Dial’s drawings to our permanent collection. Four private collectors, Ron and June Shelp, Martha Howard, Tom Larkin, and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, shared drawings from their personal collections in support of this important effort.

Finally, I am indebted to Bernie Herman, whose vision and indefatigable leadership have made the project a reality. By bringing his considerable expertise to the project, he has not only contributed to the scholarship but shepherded the book through every stage, starting with recruiting and encouraging the distinguished authors who join us in this effort: Glenn Hinson, Colin Rhodes, Juan Logan, and Cara Zimmerman.

I am confident that, thanks to the contributions of all of our collaborators, this book adds substantially to the growing body of scholarship on the work of Thornton Dial and enlivens an interdisciplinary approach to the field of American art.

EMILY KASS, DIRECTOR, ACKLAND ART MUSEUM

Acknowledgments

Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper began as a passing conversation with Bill Arnett about why was it that Thornton Dial’s works on paper appeared to have received little focused attention compared to the critical responses to his often monumental mixed-media works. In response to that first exchange, Bill Arnett compiled a portfolio of Dial’s earliest works on paper made in 1990 and 1991. That portfolio forms the basis for the five essays in this book and for an accompanying exhibition of the drawings at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in 2012. Discussions about the shape that this book and the exhibition might take began in the last meeting of a graduate art history seminar at the University of Delaware in 2008. In 2009, the exploration of Dial’s first drawings informed a seminar in American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The students from both universities responded to Dial’s drawings with incredible enthusiasm and insight that resulted in this book and the Ackland exhibition. Through the efforts of the Ackland’s director, Emily Kass, and director for external affairs, Amanda Hughes, Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper became a reality. Emily Kass passionately supported this project from start to finish. From our first conversation to visits to see Dial’s art in other collections to the realization of the exhibition and this book, Emily’s vision has sustained us all. Amanda labored heroically on every aspect of this book and the accompanying exhibition. Her enthusiasm for the art, good humor, and thoughtful interventions truly shaped this collaboration from inception to conclusion. This book would not be what it is without her many contributions. At the Ackland, Carolyn Allmendinger, Peter Nisbet, Emily Bowles, Lyn Koehnline, Scott Hankins, Anita Heggli-Swenson, and Robert Colby enabled us to work directly with the art and share Dial’s works on paper with our students.

A heartfelt round of thanks goes to the students in the two seminars that gave this exhibition its initial form. I am particularly indebted to Laura Bickford, Heather Hall, and Sarah Schultz at the University of North Carolina, who continued to contribute to the project by compiling a comprehensive research file for the authors. Our weekly conversations gave the project a continuing energy. Emily Hammond contributed the digital film documentation of Thornton Dial drawing in the course of a class field trip to the artist’s studio in April 2009. Her footage records an extraordinary and unexpected moment when Dial, with his friend Lonnie Holley, engaged the class. Erin Corrales-Diaz worked on the project in its final stages, organizing illustrations and fact-checking the essays.

The opportunity to present Dial’s drawings and the project at the Center for the Study of the American South helped give this volume form. I am especially indebted to Harry Watson, William Ferris, Joy Kasson, John Kasson, Marcie Ferris, Robert Cantwell, Kathy Roberts, Tol Foster, Patricia Sawin, Glenn Hinson, and Susan Harbage Page for sharing their thoughts in those first conversations. Additional thanks go to Kathleen Foster and Ann Percy at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their insights and enthusiasm.

Support for Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper came from a number of sources. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the David G. Frey Expendable American Art Fund, and the William Hayes Ackland Trust supported the exhibition, this book, and additional public programming. At the University of North Carolina, the Department of American Studies, the APPLES Service Learning Program, and the Ackland enabled students and faculty to visit Mr. Dial in his Alabama studio. Bill and Matt Arnett provided extraordinary assistance to every aspect of this project. Their knowledge and good will included visits to the Dial family, access to the collections of The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and the photography of Dial’s art work. This book would not exist without their generosity and insight. Photographer Steve Pitkin of Pitkin Studios in Chicago not only made the images of Dial’s art but also went out of his way to provide the images with speed and good humor. Mike Taylor transcribed my 2010 interview with Mr. Dial and his sons. At the University of North Carolina Press, Mark Simpson-Vos and Mary Carley Caviness shepherded this book forward in countless ways.

Fellow travelers and contributors to this volume Cara Zimmerman, Glenn Hinson, Juan Logan, and Colin Rhodes made this project a pleasure from start to finish. Their collective insights make this volume a truly original contribution to understanding the work of one of the greatest American artists. Rebecca Herman, as ever, was there at the beginning and stayed to the end, sharing her artist’s eye and heart.

BERNARD L. HERMAN, CHAPEL HILL

Thornton Dial

Figure 1.1 Thornton Dial drawing at Dial Metal Patterns, Bessemer, Alabama (April 2009). Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.

Thornton Dial, Thoughts on Paper

BERNARD L. HERMAN

Thornton Dial gathers his thoughts, the sheet of paper lying flat in front of him (fig. 1.1). He bends over the textured white surface, charcoal in hand, poised in a moment of meditation and decision. With startling speed his arm sweeps into motion, the first looping line resolving itself into head, torso, limbs. Face and hair follow. Edges soften with shading and watercolor wash. Dial’s drawing floods upon the paper, and in minutes, a woman is fully present—sinuous, swirling, sensuous, lyrical, beckoning, elegant (fig. 1.2). To her side a bird flutters in awkward flight.

In the following weeks, Dial returns to the original drawing, adding new elements and color (fig. 1.3). A second bird, sketched in loose lines of lavender-blue and pink flies in the upper left corner behind the woman’s tilted head. Smaller birds perch calmly in her hands. Her breasts float spherically. Wraithlike trees rise against the outer borders of the composition; bands of brown and blue fill the lower register, suggesting a ground of earth and water. In its flowing lines and color washes the finished work evokes a rapturous sense of Edenic

Figure 1.2 Thornton Dial, untitled drawing (April 2009). Photograph: Bernard L. Herman.

innocence. And yet the woman’s lightly rouged cheeks, lipsticked mouth, and green-shadowed eyes hint at an imminent knowledge.

Encountering Dial’s drawings, the first quality a viewer perceives is movement at once balletic and ballistic, where dance and power coalesce. Dial’s is a world of dynamic gesture, where each drawing fixes a continuous stream of action for a moment, much the way a photograph freezes flowing water and in that stilled instant reveals the unceasing agitation of liquid twisting and tumbling. Dial’s early drawings represented in the series Life Go On, Fishing for Love (also called Fishing for Business), and Lady Will Stand by Her Tiger speak to a continuous poetical reflection about relationships between men and women, people and power, and struggle and faith. The women, tigers, birds, and fish found in Dial’s first drawings appear again and again through the thematic history of his works on paper. Birds nest upon heads; tigers prance and curl in impossible poses. Huge fish bracket painted faces. Roosters strut and make themselves available to admiring women.

Drawing has been a significant element in Dial’s art since 1990. Before that time, his work generally took the form of found-object sculptures and mixed-media paintings, often monumental in scale. In the ensuing years, the vision and ambition that inspired his art evolved in extraordinary directions. Two major exhibitions have celebrated Dial’s art. The Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted a retrospective, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, in 2011; in 2005–06, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston hosted Thornton Dial in the 21st Century. With these exhibitions, accompanying publications, and the inclusion of his art in numerous other shows and permanent collections in major museums, Dial’s reputation has grown along with a greater public awareness of the strength and vision of his art. But while his densely layered sculptural works have garnered critical praise and thoughtful interpretation, his drawings have tended to be assigned secondary status. The exhibition catalog for the 2011 Indianapolis Museum of Art Dial retrospective, for example, offered rich readings of Dial’s mixed-media works but scant commentary on his drawings, consigning them to a separate portfolio at the volume’s conclusion introduced with the summary observation, In addition to his large-scale painting and sculptures, Dial has made innumerable drawings since the early 1990s. Highly lyrical in nature, these line renderings depict many of the same social and political themes represented in his other works.¹

Figure 1.3 Thornton Dial, finished untitled work begun in April 2009 (September 2010). Ackland Art Museum.

The essays in this volume offer the first sustained look at the body of works on paper that Dial produced in his earliest efforts with the medium. To assist that examination, this essay explores the contexts for Dial’s drawings, turning first to an account of how he began his engagement with the medium and second to suggesting a framework for reflecting on these works.

The story of how Dial developed as an artist has been told on multiple occasions, but a brief reprise of that history helps us place the first drawings in Dial’s larger artistic practice before advancing a more detailed account of how he began to produce his works on paper. Dial, born in 1928, recounts how he has made things throughout his life. As a child living in impoverished circumstances in central Alabama, he made his own playthings, including miniature grasshopper-drawn wagons. In adulthood, his ability to envision design problems and resolve them, often with found and cast-off materials, stood him in good stead as a farmer, builder, and industrial worker. The deeply ingrained racial and class prejudice of southern society and a resulting lack of access to formal education and professional opportunity frustrated Dial’s efforts to provide for his family. When he was a farmer, his hay was burned and his access to markets thwarted by unknown persons most likely linked to the larger campaign of intimidation and terror that marked the campaign for civil rights. Similarly, credit for his innovations in the Pullman car plant at which he worked was appropriated by his white supervisors. To supplement his income, Dial made things ranging from the fish traps he used in local waters to the ornamental metal furniture he and his sons made for sale. In the mid-1980s, he turned his mind and hands to art. It was not that Dial had not been making art throughout his life; his art-making was a gradual evolution that first took the form of an increasingly elaborate yard show, as well as personal works before emerging as a full-blown commitment.

In 1987, Dial’s fellow artist and friend Lonnie Holley introduced him to William Arnett, who was deeply engaged in documenting African American vernacular art across the South, a project that resulted in the two volumes of Souls Grown Deep.² From the outset, Arnett advocated passionately for the importance of Dial’s art. He introduced museum directors, curators, artists, and scholars to Dial and his work through exhibitions and visits to the artist’s home in the Pipe Shop neighborhood of Bessemer, Alabama. Video footage shot by artist and art historian Judith McWillie in 1988 documents Dial, Arnett, and Holley in the artist’s sculpture-filled yard where Dial responds to questions about his art