Thornton Dial, Sr.: Thoughts on Paper

This pioneering exhibition will present an under-appreciated side to the work of Thornton Dial, Sr. (b. 1928), an artist who draws on the vernacular traditions of the American south. The self-taught Dial has been considered both as an outsider or folk artist and as a major figure on the contemporary scene celebrated for his large scale, multi-media assemblages. Since the early 1990s, Dial has also produced a rich body of lyrical works on paper, often engaged with the themes of gender and human relationships. This exhibition focuses on the very earliest of those drawings, a group of 50 sheets with Dial's characteristic and broadly coherent iconography of women, fish, birds, roosters, and tigers, rendered in a variety of media.