Overview of Exhibition

This pioneering exhibition will present an underappreciated 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.