The self-taught American artist Thornton Dial died on 25 January. He was 87 years old.
Born in 1928 to sharecroppers in Alabama’s western flatlands, from childhood Dial created sculptures, drawings and paintings with salvaged materials. His work is known to address social injustices such as poverty and the African slave trade. In the late 1980s, after years of working in a boxcar factory, the artist met the Atlanta art collector Bill Arnett through another self-taught artist, Lonnie Holley. At the time, Dial was storing his works in an unused poultry coop.
Flash forward a few decades, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the High Museum of Art all own works by the artist. At the Christie’s auction titled Liberation Through Expression: Outsider and Vernacular Art and held on 22 January—just days before his death—a painting titled Hard Labor (1998) achieved $40,000 (est $20,000-$40,000).
Dial joined the Marianne Boesky Gallery in October 2015, and the gallery will continue to represent his estate. In a statement, Boesky said: “His work moved me, as did his ability to engage and connect on a personal level with nearly everyone he met. Mr Dial epitomised a type of understated artist, with a modesty that could bely the incredible power and depths of his creativity and insight.”