DISASTER AREAS IS PRESENTED BY THE SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION IN CONJUNCTION WITH BILL LOWE GALLERY ON THE OCCASION OF THE NATIONAL BLACK ARTS FESTIVAL HONORING THORNTON DIAL IN THEIR INTERPRETATION SERIES: BLACK VISUAL ARTISTS – PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, coal mining catastrophes and terrorist attacks have become a part of the world’s daily conversation, filmed and reported by a 24-hour news cycle or uploaded to YouTube by people on the ground. Dial, like the rest of us, has witnessed these disasters through the filter of the television screen, inundated with images of flooded homes, stranded families, and fields strewn with debris. The inevitable visual imprints left by these images are re-worked by Dial into compositions that tell the more complex stories of individual lives affected, the unequal hardships that the poor are forced to endure, and the role of the artist as documentarian.
This exhibition, on view 8 july to 27 August, 2011, examines works made by Dial over the past four years dealing with various disasters, natural and man-made. From the wreckage and rubble of destruction Dial constructs complex and beautiful assemblages that illustrate the fragility of the human condition but affirm the profound belief that we are all in this together.
About Thornton Dial
Born in a cornfield to an unwed teenage mother, Dial grew up in rural Emelle, in Alabama’s western flatlands. He began full-time farm work at age five and managed to attend school only rarely. On the eve of World War II, he was sent to live with relatives in Bessemer, just outside Birmingham. There, he married, raised a family, and worked for half a century in heavy industry, building highways, houses and ultimately boxcars during a thirty-year stint at the Pullman Standard Plant. Dial’s life encompasses many of the most consequential episodes in twentieth-century African-American life–sharecropping in the Black Belt, migration from country to city, the upheavals of the civil rights era, and the ethnic conundrums of a rapidly changing postmodern America.
Image: THORNTON DIAL – LOUISIANA – MIXED MEDIA ON PANEL – 72 X 74 X 6 INCHES, BILL LOWE GALLERY
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