Thornton Dial: A Gift: Gallery Two • In-Person and Online

JUNE 12 - SEPTEMBER 13, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION

THURSDAY, JUNE 12: 6 - 8PM

Almost 35 years ago, Ricco/Maresca Gallery—then located in Tribeca—presented New York’s first exhibition of Thornton Dial and the Dial family. That landmark show was followed by His Spoken Dreams (1999) and Drawings (2000), affirming the gallery’s enduring commitment to a singular voice in American art. In the decades since, the art world has caught up. Dial’s work has entered the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His first major museum retrospective, Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial (2011–12), traveled from the Indianapolis Museum of Art to New Orleans, Charlotte, and Atlanta. In 2018, the Met mounted History Refused to Die, a landmark exhibition drawn from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation’s 2014 gift, placing Dial’s work in dialogue with other self-taught Black artists from the American South. Most recently, his art was featured in Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2023), marking a new phase of international recognition.

Born in Emelle, Alabama, in 1928, Thornton Dial’s formal education ended in childhood. A life of labor—decades in metalwork at the Pullman Standard Company—preceded his emergence as an artist at age 55, following a layoff. Dial’s early instinct to transform discarded materials into toys would later become the cornerstone of his monumental assemblages. Collector and scholar William Arnett first brought Dial’s work into public view in 1987. Until then, his wife Clara Mae had urged him to bury his creations in the yard.

In the mid-1990s, Dial turned to drawing with renewed intensity, creating intimate works that carried the same urgency as his large-scale assemblages and paintings, but through a more improvisational, gestural mode. This exhibition revisits a vital series of works on paper produced between 1995 and 2000—each one explosive in its immediacy, completed in a burst of creative energy that allowed the subconscious to speak without filter. The forms are raw and deeply intuitive: looping, entangled lines conjure figures in states of flux, sex, anguish, and metamorphosis—human, animal, mythic, and abstract. Women appear prominently, sometimes as erotic archetypes, other times as elemental beings that blur with birds, fish, or dreamlike shapes. Bodies twist and morph, folding into themselves in scenes that feel both feral and ecstatic. Vivid reds punctuate many of the compositions, evoking themes of violence, birth, and transformation. Throughout, Dial’s palette and mark-making oscillate between turbulence and control, mirroring the emotional and psychological extremes his work so often confronts.

While Dial’s paintings and assemblages often grapple with the long shadow of American history—racial violence, systemic oppression, the struggle for black liberation—his drawings turn inward, mapping the terrain of desire, fear, memory, and the shifting contours of identity. Yet in Dial’s world, the personal and historical are inseparable. Even in these intimate works, history hums beneath the surface: faces materialize and dissolve like ancestral echoes, while figures gather into spectral crowds, at once haunted and haunting. The interior becomes a stage where memory and myth intersect with the lived realities that shaped his life and vision. Their lines do not merely outline form; they breathe. They grapple. They remember. Each drawing is a compact, poetic testament to an artist who refused to be silenced—who trusted his hand, his instinct, and his truth. In showing them now, we celebrate that trust. And we reaffirm our own.