Thornton Dial was born in rural Alabama in 1928 and spent most of his adult life laboring in the region’s heavy industry, including work as a welder for the railway car-maker Pullman Standard Company. Throughout his life, Dial also made “things,” and gradually became adept in the media of painting, drawing, sculpture and watercolor. Dial first gained recognition as a major artist in the late 1980s, with the growing interest in so-called “folk” or “outsider” art. Despite being self-taught and choosing to remain outside of the formalized art world, his work has continued to earn critical praise for its deft fusion of painting and sculpture, its emotional power, its wide-reaching social commentary, and its unique expression of a contemporary vision of the African American experience in the South. Dial’s works are included in the collections of a number of major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the IMA, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
This brief description is copied from the IMA, Hard Truths, exhibition web-site: Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial | Indianapolis Museum of Art
