Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper

This pioneering exhibition will present an under-appreciated side to the work of Thornton Dial, Sr. (b. 1928), an artist best known and celebrated for his large-scale, multi-media assemblages dealing with a wide range of charged social and political themes. Since the early 1990s, Dial has also produced a rich body of lyrical works on paper, often engaged with 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. Organized by the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina.