Thornton Dial: Mr. Dial’s America at David Lewis Gallery

Brooklyn Rail - Art Review - March 5, 2018

Thornton Dial, The Color of Money: The Jungle of Justice, 1996. Fabric, shoe, gloves, jigsaw puzzle pieces, artificial flowers and plants, dolls, stuffed animals, rope carpet, toys, cotton, found metal, other found materials, oil, enamel, spray paint, industrial sealing compound, on canvas mounted on wood. 77 x 86 x 12 inches. Courtesy David Lewis, New York. © Estate of Thornton Dial. Collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

History is made up of layers. The present, like a creeping vine, overtakes the past and without studied remembrance it becomes easy to forget that times now are not always what times once were. Thornton Dial, the great American artist who passed away in 2016 at the age of 87, always had a penetrating eye cast upon the nation’s history, his work layered with the strata of time. “Mr. Dial’s America,” the small but far-reaching survey at David Lewis Gallery brings together eight of the artist’s masterful works. Spanning across twenty-one years, close to the entirety of Dial’s professional artistic career, they provide an accounting of American stories from an artist with a uniquely American perspective.

Read more: https://brooklynrail.org/2018/03/artseen/Thornton-Dial-Mr-Dials-America