Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Thornton Dial was a self-taught artist from rural Alabama who made a successful transition to the “mainstream” American art world in his later years. His assemblages visually recall traditions of southern, African American folk art that rely on found or recycled objects, but also evoke works from the modernist canon, such as the assemblages of Kurt Schwitters. While many of Dial’s found-object assemblages reference contemporary events such as 9/11 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, others comment on his experience of life in the segregated South. In this work, bark figures are literally bound to the work’s support with wire mesh, suggesting the literal and metaphorical confinement of slavery and segregation.