Every Drawing That I Do, I Think about the Lord
Thornton Dial’s Journey of Faith
Alabama artist Thornton Dial needs little prompting to tell the story of his youngest daughter’s passing in 1987. Patricia Ann, the fourth of the Dials’ five children, was born with severe cerebral palsy. In her twenty-eight years, she never walked, never spoke, never ate without assistance. Yet by all accounts, she was the light of the Dial household, gracing all who met her with a radiant smile and cheerful laugh. Neighbors and family members still tell stories about carrying Pat Dial from place to place, still talk about how they could read her feelings from her deeply expressive eyes, still proudly recall the crowds that attended her funeral. But the story that Thornton Dial tells most often takes place immediately after Pat passed. When she visited him as a spirit.
Mr. Dial was at home, he recalls, working in his backyard shop while other family members stood their shifts with his daughter in the hospital. Then suddenly, “in the minute that she passed,” he heard Pat’s voice, a voice he had never heard in her lifetime. “That was her,” he says with conviction. After a moment’s pause, he adds, “and the Lord.”
Figure 3.1 Thornton Dial (2010). Photograph: Glenn Hinson.
So [Patricia] told me—
said, “Daddy, don’t worry about nothing.”
She told me that.
And since then—
and my job had shut down on me too, you know—
it shut down.
And then she come back to me in the spirit of her life,
[and] she said, “Daddy, don’t worry about nothing.”
So I didn’t worry.1
When Mr. Dial recounts this moment, he does so with a matter-of-factness that suggests not only certainty but also an understanding that grounds this certainty in faith. “I heard it with my natural ear,” he attests. “God just showed it to me in a spiritual way that He still had a part of me. You know what I’m saying? He had a part of me, and he just sent her back, as a spirit, and telled me these words.” Pat Dial’s momentary return, in other words, came not by her own will, but rather by the Lord’s, who sent her to the elder Dial with words of assurance. Don’t worry. All will be fine. I’m still looking out for you. And Mr. Dial—knowing, as he says, that “God talks to you, and when the Lord starts talking, you start paying attention”—heard his daughter’s message as an easing balm, a promise that the hard times he had so long suffered would soon be over.2
Those times had indeed been hard. Six years before his daughter’s passing, Thornton Dial had lost his longtime job at Pullman-Standard, the massive boxcar-manufacturing plant whose 1981 closing sent shock waves throughout Bessemer, Alabama. Even before the plant’s demise, Mr. Dial had worked a variety of “outside” jobs to sustain his family and provide for his disabled daughter’s care. With Pullman-Standard’s closing, however, and an ensuing unemployment rate in Bessemer that soared to 33 percent, opportunities to profit from such work dwindled. In response, Thornton Dial joined his sons (all three of whom had also worked at Pullman-Standard) in a homegrown business fashioning metal outdoor furniture. On the side, he pursued a strikingly creative assortment of money-making endeavors, from operating a backyard café and cutting neighbors’ hair to fabricating gravesite decorations and crafting fishing lures. Even the slightest measure of financial stability, however, remained elusive. And now Mr. Dial faced the added expenses of his daughter’s hospitalization and funeral. His meager pension from Pullman-Standard helped a bit; so too did his daughter’s disability benefits, which the family had been receiving since her eighteenth birthday. But now that check was no longer coming. “She knowed that I was going to be in trouble,” Thornton Dial recalls, “because she was getting a check and I was getting a little Pullman check, you know. And it wasn’t enough to help me. But she told me, ‘Don’t worry.’ That means a whole lot. That is the Lord.”3
The story of Pat Dial’s passing—and her subsequent voiced assurance—is only the first part of this oft-told Dial family narrative. The second half recounts the fulfilling of God’s promise, a fulfilling that unfolded less than four months later. Patricia Dial died in late March of 1987; in July of that same year, Birmingham artist Lonnie Holley stopped by the Dial household. Mr. Dial says that he was initially wary of the dreadlocked visitor; nonetheless, he heard Holley’s words in a frame of trusting expectation:
“[Lonnie Holley] say, ‘Mr. Dial,’ he say, ‘did you know this is art?’” pointing to the sculptural forms that graced Dial’s yard.
“I said, ‘What you mean?’” recalls Mr. Dial, chuckling at the memory.
“He said, ‘This is art.’ Said, ‘I’m going to bring you somebody to help you.’ And he did.”
A few days later, Holley returned with curator, collector, and scholar of African American vernacular art William Arnett. The encounter that ensued—marked by Arnett’s amazement at Dial’s artistry, the negotiated purchase of one of his pieces (at a price exponentially higher than that suggested by Mr. Dial), and the emergence of a relationship that allowed Mr. Dial to dedicate all his energies to making art—has become the stuff of art world legend, told again and again in writings about Thornton Dial. What typically doesn’t appear in these tellings, however, is Mr. Dial’s thankful coda to the story, a coda that brings the narrative full circle to its spiritual beginnings. “God have did a whole lot for me. Even Mr. Arnett, and [his] coming into my life—you know, I have to look at that,” muses Mr. Dial. “Because Mr. Arnett—he have did great things for me. And that was the Lord. . . . That was my blessing.”
Thornton Dial has no doubts about the source of his blessing. He sees his deceased daughter’s visitation, Lonnie Holley’s unexpected visit, and Bill Arnett’s generous patronage as linked acts of divine providence, all guided by God’s hand. He connects these moments, in turn, to many others in his lifetime that similarly testify to the constancy of the Lord’s loving oversight. Indeed, Mr. Dial sees his entire life’s story—and thus, not surprisingly, all of his artwork—as telling evidence of God’s blessings:
Anytime I think about things like that,
I know who it was—
it was the Lord.
You know.
The Lord is all we have to depend on.
You know that.
In your singing, in whatever you do—
the Lord is involved in anything that we do.
And living—our living—
it belongs to the Lord.
You know.
The only thing you got to do is believe in Him.
You know.
And if you believe in the Lord,
the Lord will take care of you.
That’s who took care of me—
the Lord.4
Intriguingly, this isn’t a perspective that most people associate with Thornton Dial. This is particularly true for those who are not members of Mr. Dial’s immediate community. Although whispers of belief echo through his published interviews and find passing insinuation in essays about his life and work, Mr. Dial’s Christian faith never emerges as a foregrounded theme. The focus instead falls on his sophisticated political commentary, his lucid articulations of experienced history, his mastery of an African American vernacular grammar of style, symbol, synthesis, and referenced grace. But not on his faith, or on the myriad ways that this faith frames Mr. Dial’s interpretations of his creativity, his responsibility as an artist, and his self-recognized role as an agent of God’s will.5
When I first went to visit Mr. Dial, I hoped to speak with him about his beliefs and to ask him about possible connections between his works on paper and his Christian understandings. The link admittedly seemed rather tenuous. After all, none of the themes in these pieces explicitly references faith, though one could certainly do enough interpretive gymnastics to create “plausible” connections.6 The birds atop women’s heads, for instance, could be taken to represent the familiar image of the dove of the Holy Spirit; the many fish in these works, in turn, could be seen as symbols of Christianity. Then again, though, these birds might simply be birds, like those that Thornton Dial recalls trapping as a child to supplement his family’s meals; and the fish might simply reference the catfish that Mr. Dial so often caught for his suppertime table or sold to support his family. Some of Mr. Dial’s other works, however, do make explicit references to Christianity. These include his 1988 God’s Womb piece (fig. 3.4); his 1992 Sanctified Dancing works (one of which swirls around an image of Jesus holding a lamb); and his 2003 Keeping Jesus Christ Alive drawing (fig. 3.2). Furthermore, some of his published comments do suggest (if often obliquely) a vision of God as both master artist and grantor of the knowledge that fuels human creativity. So my quest seemed reasonable.7
What I didn’t expect, though, was the detailed fullness of Thornton
Figure 3.2 Thornton Dial, Keeping Jesus Christ Alive (2003). Pencil and watercolor on paper. 30 × 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
Dial’s professions of faith, or the enthusiastic affirmations offered by his sons Richard and Dan when we discussed matters of the Spirit. I had hardly begun asking about Mr. Dial’s beliefs when he recounted the story of Patricia’s passing and her spiritual return; the narrative reemerged many times over subsequent visits, grounding conversations about divine agency and Mr. Dial’s special “calling” as an artist. Richard and Dan Dial, in turn, both added details to the story, noting that their father had been telling it ever since he first heard Patricia’s voice.8 They also fully endorsed the spiritual interpretation of Arnett’s appearance, asserting not only that his support had allowed their father’s creativity to blossom but also that it provided an opportunity for the Lord to speak more abundantly and publicly through their father’s work. Everyone seemed to agree that the spiritual dimension of Thornton Dial’s life was absolutely central to understanding his artistry.
Yet this was also the dimension that seemed markedly absent from the scholarship on Mr. Dial. Struck by this disparity, and by the fact that a story seen by the Dial family as so central to Mr. Dial’s life didn’t appear in any of his published biographical profiles, I called Bill Arnett for clarification. I was well aware that this narrative placed Arnett in a rather strange position, in that it portrayed him as an active agent of God’s will; I was equally aware that this placement would understandably have kept him from repeating the story in any of his many writings about Thornton Dial, lest it might appear gratuitously self-serving. Nonetheless, I wondered how often he had heard the account, and how much he had spoken with Mr. Dial about his faith.
Arnett affirmed that he had heard the story “many times”; notwithstanding, he downplayed its significance, suggesting that a focus on Mr. Dial’s spiritual beliefs risked detracting attention from his broader significance as a world-class artist. In essence, Arnett argued that stories like this one provided tools for aesthetic and academic dismissal, inviting critics, collectors, and curators to exoticize artists, making it easier to categorize them as “outsider” or “folk” artists rather than simply as artists. This is particularly true, he suggested, for artists who are southern, African American, and working-class. If these factors frame the criteria of assessment, then artists like Thornton Dial will always be marginalized, both by the elite world of the art museum and by the differently discriminating world of the “folk/outsider art” market. And stories like this one—which centers on a spiritual encounter easily dismissed by nonbelievers as evidence of “superstition” and willful misinterpretation—can easily set the marginalizing machinery in motion.9
Arnett is right, of course. The conjoined worlds of museum and market both seem to hesitate when facing heartfelt expressions of faith in art, yielding two very different strategic—and ultimately dismissive—responses. One of these entails quiet erasure; the other involves exaggerated embrace. Both effectively discount the fullness of artists’ beliefs.10
The first of these approaches, and the one most congruent with Arnett’s own dismissal of Mr. Dial’s professions of faith, takes the form of simple disregard. This perspective holds that belief and artistry, however intertwined in an artist’s actual practice, essentially comprise two distinctly separate domains that need not be cross-referenced when presenting art. Consequently, when art is the focus— as in the rarefied realm of museum presentation—belief tends to get excised from both catalog essay and label, treated almost as if it were an embarrassingly mundane bystander at the aesthetic parade. Needless to say, this practice tacitly declares the irrelevance of artists’ faith, effectively secularizing their creative output while calculatedly recrafting their biographies. No longer saddled with the “distractions” of religiosity, the art can command center stage.11
If this first approach erases faith in order to present spiritually evacuated art, the second exaggerates it, bringing it to the presentational foreground in ways that both distort and diminish the featured artistry. This is precisely the practice that Arnett hoped to avoid, and one that he knew characterized many market presentations of self-taught art. The promoters and collectors of such art have long relied on structures of “othering” to both romanticize and marginalize the artists they celebrate. One of the principal means of establishing the requisite distance between the art’s consumers and its creators has been to focus on the artists’ religious beliefs. These beliefs become a marker of difference and—in the eyes of its generally disbelieving consumers—an indicator of eccentricity, if not of deviance. Collectors, dealers, and curators almost seem to seek out beliefs and religious practices that vary from narrow, white, middle-class norms, searching artists’ biographies (and their artworks) for evidence of visions, prophetic callings, or evangelical proclamation. Once found, such “evidence” often assumes a foundational place in artists’ biographies, cementing their oddity while providing an eminently exotic and tellable story for the collectors who purchase their work.12
This search for religious outsiderness is particularly pointed in the African American South, where even the normative practices of black vernacular Christianity become the subject of outside disbelievers’ gaze. Shouting, holy dancing, chanted preaching, and the intense engagement of gospel singing all become the stuff of exoticizing story. So too do the vernacular magical practices of hoodoo and voodoo, which collectors and critics seem to find in every corner of African American vernacular art. (The assumption seems to be that if you search hard enough, you’ll always find hidden references to African-based magical belief, whether the medium is quilts, paintings, sculptures, or yard displays.13) Sometimes conjured entirely in the observer’s imagination, many more times exaggerated, and almost always misunderstood, the religious beliefs of African American vernacular artists tend to loom large in these artists’ marketplace biographies, often superseding (and hence distorting) all other aspects of their lives. This was precisely Bill Arnett’s concern.
But is the only answer to the excesses of religious misportrayal one that erases the lived realities of faith, avoiding the second approach by adopting the first? One would hope instead for a representational balance between the aesthetic and the spiritual, such that one doesn’t outweigh the other. Such an approach would present artistry through the lens of lived belief, without this belief somehow diminishing the creative fullness of the artistry. Perhaps this is too much to ask of an academic and museological realm so thoroughly steeped in its own disbelief, or of a marketplace so utterly defined by its appetite for otherness. Yet this is no reason to abandon the attempt. Portraying artists who see themselves as people of faith as both creators and believers restores the balance that they live every day. This approach also invites conversations about the artists’ own understandings of their creativity, understandings that invariably reveal complexities that resist the simplifying parsing of museum and marketplace portrayal. Hence when Thornton Dial turns to his artwork and pointedly asks,
Why do you think I made it?
Huh?
I made it because the Lord have opened a way for me
to make that.
That’s the way I feel.
And that’s the way it have to be,14
we suddenly face a set of questions that profoundly complicate the story of both his life and his artistry. No longer are we looking at a lone moment of extraordinary spiritual encounter. Instead, we’re being invited to step into the fullness of Mr. Dial’s faith.
This fullness dates back to Thornton Dial’s childhood years, when he was growing up in his great-grandmother’s house in Sumter County, Alabama, near the rural community of Emelle. The family, and many of their kin and neighbors, regularly attended Jones Baptist Church, a small sanctuary on the old farmplace on which they lived; indeed, Mr. Dial’s great-grandfather (who died when Thornton Dial was still a small child) was a deacon there. At church, the young Dial found himself immersed in the vernacular world of Baptist worship, fueled by congregational singing, spirited testifying, elegantly improvised praying, and tunefully eloquent preaching. Like most of its regional counterparts, Jones Baptist Church welcomed the movement of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that the Spirit—God’s promised Comforter—was actively engaged in even the most mundane matters of the world. Not some ethereal figure who provided vague inspiration and little more, the Spirit was a palpably active agent in both worship and everyday life. As such, He was eminently real, a force encountered, engaged, felt, and known.15 Songs chorused in the workaday world, sermons delivered at the church house, and prayers offered at midweek meetings reminded believers at every turn of His in-the-moment power—He was the healer and deliverer, the way-maker and miracle worker, the heart fixer and mind regulator. The Spirit guided the lives of the faithful and worked wonders through the passage of history; He brought comfort in the face of tragedy, offered hope in the face of despair, and counseled patience in the face of frustration and rage. His was a profoundly experienced presence. And His worship brought experienced blessings—sometimes subtly, sometimes recognized only in retrospect, sometimes dramatically. Those blessings most evident to the young Dial were the livelier ones—congregation members’ thankful tears, their ecstatic “shouting” (often punctuated by joyful cries of “Thank You, Jesus!”), their spirited holy dancing, and the rhythmic excitement of the preacher’s prophetic sermons. This was all part of Thornton Dial’s childhood world.16
For the young Dial, these workings of God were more witnessed than experienced; as he now tells it, he watched and took note but didn’t yet feel. This watchfulness continued after the passing of his mother’s grandmother (who had raised him since shortly after his birth), when the young Dial moved to urban Bessemer to live with his maternal grandmother’s sister, Sarah Dial Lockett, and her husband, Dave Lockett. Like Mr. Dial’s great-grandmother, the Locketts were dedicated churchgoers and engaged believers; Mr. Lockett was a deacon (as well as a singer in, and manager of, a gospel quartet), while Ms. Lockett taught Sunday school. Right away, the twelve-year-old Dial began attending Antioch Baptist Church with them (fig. 3.3). He “was crazy about the Lord” even then, Mr. Dial recalls, but he wasn’t yet saved. This was to wait until he returned to Sumter County two years later, when he left the Locketts to move in with his cousin. There, in a Thursday-night revival in 1946, Thornton Dial “got religion,” finally experiencing the ecstatic power of the Spirit. From that point forward, there was no question about feeling what he had earlier only seen. Now it was a feeling that he knew, an experience so profound that it left no question about its source. “The Spirit [is] on you then,” he says, smiling. “The Spirit can hit you in many different ways. Sure enough can. And that is the Lord.”17
Shortly thereafter, the seventeen-year-old Dial was baptized in Wallace Pool, a pasture pond near the family’s Sumter County church. He recalls that his great-uncle Dave Lockett—who still lived in Bessemer—brought him his first-ever suit of clothes for the baptism; on that very same day, the cousin with whom he was living passed away. With his cousin now gone, Thornton Dial returned to Bessemer and moved back in with the Locketts; once there, he immediately joined Antioch Baptist as a full member. “I was more into the church than I was anything else,” he remembers. “I was more into the church than I was outdoors,” he adds, contrasting his experience in Bessemer with that of his childhood days in rural Sumter County. “Because I believe in the Lord. I really believe in Him.”18
Once he crossed over into the fellowship of the saved, Thornton Dial never turned back. By his own recounting, he has ever since lived a life of faith, holding steadfast to his knowledge of God’s saving grace, and to his conviction that the Lord has chosen him for a life of holy service. Humbly acknowledging the Lord’s many blessings, Mr. Dial offers praise and thanksgiving at every opportunity, noting that “you have to think about the Lord to get blessings from the Lord. And that’s what I call myself doing.” Having raised his family in the faith (his son Richard served for many years as a church trustee), the elder Dial very much sees himself as a dedicated spiritual worker whose ministry is his art; through it, he is able to both teach and preach God’s love, offering understandings given him by the Lord while simultaneously glorifying God’s works and will. And though he no longer
Figure 3.3 Antioch Baptist Church (2010). Photograph: Glenn Hinson.
regularly attends services, Mr. Dial’s church membership remains active, his faith remains strong, and his testimony—offered through both his art and his commentary about it—remains powerful. “Once [you’re] in Christ,” he reminds us, “you’re never out.”19
Key to understanding Mr. Dial’s sense of his role as an agent of God’s will is the notion of spiritual gifts, special endowments said to be granted to the faithful by the Lord. African American churchgoers in the working-class South have long held that the full catalog of God-given gifts far exceeds those set forth by the apostle Paul in the much-cited twelfth chapter of I Corinthians (where Paul speaks of the gifts of healing, prophecy, tongue-speaking, and more). These believers contend that any singular skill—any realm of special mastery that sets one apart from one’s peers and that lends itself to furthering the Lord’s work—is a gift from God. Hence, church folk talk about those who are gifted to preach, gifted to pray, gifted to sing, even gifted to offer testimony. Sometimes the gifts are gently subtle, not making themselves evident until long after their endowment; other times, they are unambiguously present, manifesting themselves with exuberant authority.20 Thornton Dial sees himself as a recipient of both kinds of gifts—first, in his clear-sighted attentiveness to all that happens around him; and second, in his effervescent creativity. The two come together in his artistry, which draws upon the former and finds fuel in the latter.
The first of these spiritual gifts—that of an incisive watchfulness— is the more understated of the two, though it’s certainly no less important than its counterpart. Whenever Mr. Dial speaks about the past, he’s quick to declare that he’s always been one who watched the world around him. “I paid attention to life ever since I been in the world,” he notes. “I always have watched people, you know. And what’s happening. I done watched that a whole lot. . . . I go way back [in] my life, in watching stuff like that.”21 Where others didn’t seem to take notice (“a heap of people didn’t pay attention to what they used to do”), Dial portrays himself as ever heedful, conscientiously taking it all in. Even as a child, he would watch, and then re-create—in his playtime moments—that which he had witnessed, crafting tiny plows, fashioning miniature roads, peopling his scenes with delicate corn-shuck figures. “My drawings come through by things that I’ve seen in the world. My playing—around in Sumter County—my playing was up under the trees, around my uncle’s place. And that’s when I come to learn how to draw a whole lot of stuff, you know, and do stuff like that,” he recalled on one occasion. “I used to sit in a sandpile and draw pictures in the dirt, men working on the roads, mules on the road, houses by the road. I was drawing and making stuff about everything I would see,” he says on another.22 Throughout, one gets the sense that Mr. Dial sees his heedfulness as something special, as an aptitude that he’s always had, even though it wasn’t one whose purpose he always understood. As a child, it was simply something he did, a prompt for play and passing reflection. In later years, though, it was to become a wellspring for creative contemplation, a bubbling font of ideas that he would capture with increasingly nuanced complexity in his art. And it began with a seemingly simple penchant for watching, with experiences and seen circumstances taken in and then waiting in mind, only later to reemerge.
“You walk through life, [and] every step you make you pick up something. You pick up a whole bunch of stuff,” notes Mr. Dial, speaking to the sense of reflective gathering that has so marked his life. “You got to keep all you pick up.”23 Hearing these words, one wonders why the need to hold onto all those experiences “picked up” through life. Why the imperative captured in the “got to”? And why would an aptitude framed as a gift carry with it such an injunction? The answer, believers would say, lies in the simple fact that gifts granted by God are given so that they might glorify God. Believers contend that such gifts are never merely given; rather, they are given to be used. For Mr. Dial, this “use” lies both in the artworks (which convey and comment upon the things he has seen) and in the lessons revealed by these “picked up” and paid-attention-to moments. For in these gathered moments, Mr. Dial sees pattern. And in this pattern, he sees the hand of God.
Figure 3.4 Thornton Dial, God’s Womb (1988). Enamel and Splash Zone compound on wood. 24 ½ × 61 inches. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Weiss Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2003.696.
When Thornton Dial speaks about the unfolding of history, he does so from the perspective of one who sees both the material world and human progress as products of God’s conscious design. He describes the Creation, for instance, as “God making a great piece of art,” creating both beauty and meaning for humans to grow into and learn from (see fig. 3.4).24 As Mr. Dial explains it, when the Lord created the world, He filled it with latent patterns, with connections awaiting discovery and knowledge awaiting its timely emergence. The design was eminently beneficent; all things were created so that humans might learn from them, and use them for good:
Everything in the world is art.
That’s true.
Everything in the world
done did somebody some good.
All this is what was
in the beginning of the world. . . .
I don’t care what fall, what stand up,
life still going to go on.
You going to find out how to use
the things created in the world for man.
The Lord laid out that kind of example
for man to go by.25
Figure 3.5 Thornton Dial, Out of the Darkness, the Lord Gave Us Light (2003). Carpet, cloth, Splash Zone compound, enamel, and spray paint on canvas on wood. 72 ½ × 74 × 3 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
There’s nothing deterministic about this vision of history. Rather than asserting that all things are foreordained, that all life follows a predetermined path, it suggests that God has set forth a trajectory, a hopeful arc of moral and spiritual growth, into which humans will grow. The patterns—Mr. Dial affirms—are clear: “God made everything so clear that even a fool could not err. At least, even a fool ought not to.”26
But people are fools, and hence have filled history with hardship and travail. Few know this as well as Thornton Dial, whose life—in his own words—has been a “struggling time,” a long sequence of trials and indignities through which he’s had to suffer and has hoped to conquer.27 Yet he’s always moved with a vision of the light ahead, recognizing that while history (both his own and the world’s) is marked by periods of darkness, God’s design promises a final transcendence, a place where the ongoingness of struggle ultimately yields a better life (see fig. 3.5):
Well, I look at life like it is, you know.
I mean, I look at the darkness and I look at the light.
I’m looking every day, because God show you that . . .
you have to look at the world and how it was operating.
Because sometimes it gets so dark out there today,
you can’t hardly see.
And that’s telling you something.
God is telling you something about life.
Sometimes, the weather gets rough, and hard,
and it just thunders and lightnings and all that stuff,
and all of a sudden it comes light.
And that’s what God brought.
He brought the dark, and then He brought the light.
So that’s what we live on.
We living on that, and we can’t live without it.28
Again, it’s a story of heedfulness—of watching, of discerning the patterns (that “God is telling you something about life”), and of finding hope therein. When the weather gets roughest, when the trials seem unbearable, God brings the light. “And we can’t live without it,” Mr. Dial declares. The gift rests in the discerning, in recognizing the divine design, and in taking comfort therein.
The watchfulness that has long graced Thornton Dial’s life is but one of his God-given gifts, a gift that he sees as complementing another that has always found far greater public expression—his seemingly ceaseless creativity. By his own accounting, Mr. Dial has been creating things all his life. Beginning with those miniature farming scenes fashioned in his childhood, he has always mulled over novel ways to make things, ever pressing the materials at hand to new and innovative uses. “I just do anything,” he remarks. “I’m just gifted to do things. I think the more gifted [you are] to do things, the more you do, [and] the more will come to you how to do it.” When his son Richard asks him about this gift, wondering aloud, “That creative part about you—where did it come from?” his father doesn’t skip a beat when responding. “It came from the Lord,” he declares.29
Thornton Dial’s children have heard this explanation virtually all of their lives. For them, their father’s creative experimentation— particularly in the decades before he met Bill Arnett and began self-consciously creating art—was an expected (if at times bewildering) feature of everyday life. One need only mention this topic in their presence, and the stories come tumbling forth—of the seventy-foot conical fishnets their father fashioned from twine and white oak; of the plow he rigged to the back of a pickup (in lieu of a tractor); of the ingenious mill he fabricated to grind feed for his livestock; of the outdoor walls he built from beer cans filled with cement. “Daddy was always just—ever since I can remember—he was always creative,” recalls Richard Dial. “He had to do something, and a lot of times, it was something odd, that other people wouldn’t do. You know. I had an uncle that stayed in Ohio, and he would come here, and he’d just—Daddy would try to explain to him what he was doing. He [the visiting uncle] would definitely try to get into it, but he just always thought that Daddy went a little bit too far, you know, regardless of what Daddy made. And it seemed like every time he would come to visit, Daddy would be working on another project.”30
The elder Dial frequently embarked on these projects in search of an occupational alternative, hoping to find a path that would free him from working at Pullman-Standard. Convinced that the Lord was providing the ideas, and thus that there was a deeper purpose in his creating, Mr. Dial kept thinking and tinkering, patiently awaiting the moment when his gift would find fruition. He knew, he now says, that there was a reason for this creative drive; he just didn’t know how or when the Lord would reveal it. His son Richard hints at the depth of this faith—and the insistence of his father’s inventiveness—when he says of his father: “His job would always pull him away from creating, though he’d always have to go running back to it.” Note the implication here—that it was the creating that Thornton Dial savored but the factory that paid the bills. “And what Daddy’s brother always told me was that, ‘As long as he [was] working at Pullman, he always was going to do something so he would have to quit,’” adds Richard Dial. “He was definitely not going to retire from Pullman-Standard.”31 The opportunity would come, Mr. Dial trusted. The gift would find its purpose.
But the factory closed first. Suddenly, Thornton Dial was forced to rely on his creativity. Although most of his children had long ago left the family home, he and his wife still cared for Patricia. Richard and Dan Dial both say that their father’s inventiveness never slowed down during this period; indeed, if anything, it blossomed. He would still leave the house early every morning, just as he had when working at Pullman-Standard. Now, though, he often went no further than his backyard workshop, where he would work until evening, making things. Fishing lures, gravesite flower stands, sculpted yard figures, cemetery crosses, metal lawn chairs, and much, much more—struggling to make a living, trusting the promise of his gift (see fig. 3.6).32
This period of pragmatic inventiveness extended until Patricia’s passing, and her spiritual return. At that moment, Thornton Dial knew that something had profoundly changed. It was one thing to trust that the Lord would provide, and that His gifts would find their purpose; it was quite another, though, to be told—via a celestial visitation—that he need no longer worry. Mr. Dial knew enough of the ways of the Spirit to recognize the significance of that message. And though he had experienced the anointing ministrations of the Spirit before, he had never felt with such certainty that his life was now in God’s guiding hands. The effect, according his son Richard, was almost immediate. “I mean, he just went wild then. That’s the particular time when he just said, ‘Okay, I’m going to be a creator.’” Then he adds, laughing, “And I’m glad to this day that Mr. Arnett were able to come by and remove some of the things that Daddy had created! Because if he hadn’t, then I don’t think it’d been a place in that community, you know, to just stack stuff that he were fixing to make!”33
Bill Arnett’s appearance on the Dial family’s doorstep offered the final confirmation of Thornton Dial’s trust. “When he came by,” reflects Mr. Dial, “I knowed that was something that the Lord had sent me.”34 Arnett not only celebrated Thornton Dial’s creativity but also promised to support it, encouraging Mr. Dial to let his imagination run free, to create without worrying about salability or sustenance. At that point, Richard Dial recalls, “Daddy was able to just focus on what
Figure 3.6 Thornton Dial, Working at Home (2000). Wire, tin, broom, wood, fabric, carpet, rope carpet, windshield wiper, rubber, plastic, spray can, tin can, toy propeller, nails, enamel, spray paint, and Splash Zone compound on wood. 39 × 49 × 6 inches. Courtesy of the Collection of Meredith and Cornelia Long.
he wanted to do.”35 And what he wanted to do, says the elder Dial, was to bring the spiritual gifts he had been given to their fullest realization. Arnett’s pledge of a sustaining livelihood invited Mr. Dial to speak through his creativity, to combine that which he had watched and contemplated for so many decades with the creative tools to express his thoughts. In essence, Arnett offered Mr. Dial a platform to testify, to publicly recount his experiences and to comment upon them. “My art do my talking,” Thornton Dial declares.
Everything I think about
and every idea my mind come up with,
and all the stuff I have seen,
every last thing that I believe
is right there in my art.36
This association between ideas, art, and identity has long been a part of Mr. Dial’s public testimony. “Every time you look at my art, that’s my mind,” he remarked in 1989. A few years later, he observed, “My art is about ideas, and about life, and the experience of the world.” Far from being simple statements that locate the self as the source of his creativity, however, these remarks actually point to a more complex understanding of the ways that the Lord’s gifts have both granted voice and provided guidance for that voice’s articulation. Hence, when asked to take this testimony a step further and to elaborate on the source of his ideas, Thornton Dial is quick to declare: “Most of my ideas came from the Lord.” On this issue, he is repeatedly—and unflinchingly—clear. “It’s more than just you,” he pronounces. “It is the Lord. And when the Lord brings something to you, you going to do it.”37 Mr. Dial’s assertion is not, by any means, a disavowal of his own creativity; rather, it signals an appreciative recognition that creativity can emerge as a kind of spiritual collaboration, a working-together wherein the Spirit provides thoughts and the means to express them, and the self brings these ideas to an individualized realization, emerging as both vehicle for and conscious shaper of the artistry.
This notion of artful collaboration between self and Spirit is a long-standing tenet of faith among African American churchgoers. Believers often point to gifted singers and God-called preachers as living exemplars of this special communion, noting that singers and preachers who are graced with God’s gifts express them not through a rote sameness but rather through sharply individualized performative styles and voiced messages. God neither controls nor stifles the self’s contribution, believers argue; rather, the Lord supports it, inviting the expression of an individual’s will while infusing this expression with affective power. The Spirit, in other words, steps into the performative moment and lends gifted artistry a mystical “power to move,” deepening its emotional impact. Thornton Dial certainly sees his own gifts within this collaborative framework, noting that they truly reveal that he was “born to be an artist,” and then adding that this path seems to always have been God’s plan.38
The fullest confirmation of this destiny rests in Mr. Dial’s own experience as an artist. When describing the process of creating, he often talks about how the Holy Spirit dwells with him, not only providing ideas but also gracing the moment with His holy presence. “I feel that all the time,” he asserts:
When I draw a picture, I feel the Spirit of the Lord.
Because actually, you can’t do it without Him.
What can you do [without Him]?
You can’t do nothing without the Lord.
And the Lord has to show you. . . .
He give you the power to do things.
And I think about that all the time.
Yeah.
Every drawing that I do, I think about the Lord. . . .
I do it according to what the Lord give me.
And when He give me something,
I work with it.
Note here how Thornton Dial begins by talking about feeling the Spirit’s presence when he creates, and closes by describing the experience of receiving God’s guidance, of “working with” that which has been “given.” Each experience confirms the fullness of other, leaving no doubt about both the presence and engagement of the Lord. An additional experienced proof of the Spirit’s presence rests in the fact that Mr. Dial often finds himself singing gospel songs while he is making art—finding, as he says, the songs “just there” on his tongue, unbeckoned but certainly welcomed. Each song comes as a gift, reminding Mr. Dial anew of the Spirit’s presence. Its singing, in turn, fills his workspace with the sounds of praise, lending an aura of sanctification to every moment of creation, while further confirming the essential connectedness between heaven and earth. “See, because it’s more than just you,” he concludes. “When you doing something, it’s more than just you out there by yourself. The Spirit will [be] with you in the time.”39
What remains unanswered is the why of this spiritual presence. Why has the Lord granted Thornton Dial these spiritual gifts? Why is He so present in the process of Mr. Dial’s artistic creation? If Mr. Dial created art that explicitly conveyed a Christian message, then the answer to these questions would perhaps be clearer. But he doesn’t. And while a small percentage of his pieces are overtly religious, most are not. At least not in ways that are readily apparent. When I posed this question to Mr. Dial, he responded first by describing the ways that the Spirit has dwelt with him throughout his life, offering sustenance through times of hardship and hope in moments of melancholy. Through all of this, Mr. Dial affirmed, he kept his mind on the Lord, ever offering thanksgiving and praises, and ever stepping forth in the world with a spirit of love. “Actually, the Lord do things for people,” he observed, “and He blesses people according to their works.”
You know, you have to think about the Lord to get blessings
from the Lord.
And that’s what I call myself doing—
[thinking] about the Lord, ever since I been baptized. . . .
He seen the best of my life.
God have looked into my life a whole lot—
I feel that—
and He tried to help me.
I think the Lord have done things for me that He ain’t did for
other people.
And that’s what my art—
I believe—
my art comes from.40
For Mr. Dial, the art—and the security and benefits that it has brought—is a God-given blessing, a kind of spiritual reward for a life of faith well lived. So when he heard his daughter Patricia’s consoling words—knowing, as he says, that his had been a life of “loving, and caring for people”—he knew that God’s fuller blessings were about to flow.
But the blessings were not only for him. Remember, believers say that spiritual gifts are given not to glorify self, but to glorify the Lord. Mr. Dial is quite clear on this point; he sees his artistry as a divine commission, as a means to testify to the broader world. Hence, in
Figure 3.7 Thornton Dial, Creation Story (2003). Clothing, carpet, steel, enamel, spray paint, and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 67 × 91 × 5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
our conversations, once he had addressed why the Lord had chosen him for these special blessings, he began to speak about his art’s purpose. To begin, he underlined the need for publicness, asserting that God gave him these gifts so that they might be communicated to the world. “He meant for me to show it,” he declares. “He meant for it to be showed, whatever I did.” What is being shown, in turn, is not an explicit message of evangelical proclamation but rather a far more nuanced message of the Lord’s steadfast—and loving—engagement in human affairs. For Thornton Dial, the art offers insights into the very nature of God.
God is the creator.
And He showing you something about Him.
So you look at a piece of art,
and you know that is something about the Lord.
Huh?
It’s something about Him.
When you see a piece,
you know that ain’t going to be dead no more.
Not by you.
In Thornton Dial’s eyes, the aesthetic and the spiritual are intimately interconnected, with God’s creativity echoed in the human creativity that He inspires. This brings us back to Mr. Dial’s earlier comments about “everything in the world” being art, wherein all things material—whether natural or humanly crafted—offer evidence of the Lord’s beneficent design (see fig. 3.7). All reveal divine pattern; all have “done somebody some good”; and in so doing, all point to God’s love. That’s why—observes Mr. Dial—art carries such affective power. “You get a feeling whenever you walk up on a piece of art,” he says. “You get a feeling, and it’s coming from the Lord.”41
Just as with singing, preaching, and other enactments of the Lord’s gifts, this experienced “feeling” is magnified when the performer’s purpose is praise. If the artist creates with God in mind, using the gift as divinely intended, then the art more profoundly moves the spirit— arousing emotion, stirring reflection, touching the soul. “That’s the whole story of the whole art,” reasons Mr. Dial.
It is the Spirit.
And you looking at it—
that is the Spirit of life.
Because that man drawed that Spirit out.
Yeah.
He drawed it out,
and then you can see so much in that Spirit.
You can see so much into it,
because that is the Spirit.
See?
And I’m studying the Spirit of life.42
The faithful artist (presented here as “that man,” one who—like Mr. Dial—spends his life “thinking about the Lord”) “draws the Spirit out” of the art, granting it an extra measure of spiritual fullness. Such art comes alive to the viewer, mystically impressing on its audience its inherent holiness. “You can see so much into it,” asserts Mr. Dial, “because that is the Spirit.” Conveying its meanings with sharpened clarity, the art offers understanding in lieu of obscurity, lucidity in lieu of ambiguity. That’s why it “ain’t going to be dead no more.” Enlivened by the Spirit, the artistry sparkles, excites, awakens.
It also provokes. Thornton Dial is, after all, by his own definition a man of ideas. Presenting himself as one who both notices and discerns patterns in history, he takes it as his duty to communicate his understandings to the public. “I just figure the Lord just gave me something there, to deal with, as a studying mind,” he observes. “And as Jesus gave me something to study over, I did it.”43 Mr. Dial feels that the resultant understandings—arising from the things “studied over”—are imbued with spiritual insight. These insights, in turn, often assume a profoundly political character, reflecting a liberatory theology that sees God as guiding history’s path toward freedom and equality.
This vision of emergent deliverance—of a social moving, in Thornton Dial’s words, from the darkness into the light—has long characterized vernacular African American faith. For generations, it has guided the civil rights struggles of African American churchgoers, grounding their resistance in their faith. At the heart of this vision rests the responsibility of individual agency; rather than waiting for the Lord to act on their behalf, believers recognize that they are the agents of God’s plan. This is precisely how Mr. Dial understands his role as an artist. It’s also a model of social, artistic, and religious engagement that he has long witnessed in his own community. As a young man, for instance, Mr. Dial came to know and admire the gifted singer and labor activist Perry “Tiger” Thompson, who worked at Pullman-Standard and was a regular visitor at the Lockett household. Thompson achieved near-legendary status in Bessemer for his fiery organizing and his staunch defense of African American workers’ rights; he also managed (and sang with) the popular Sterling Jubilee Singers, a gospel quartet that regularly performed on Thompson’s union-sponsored radio show and frequently appeared in programs at Mr. Dial’s church.44 Very much like Thornton Dial, “Tiger” Thompson—for whom Mr. Dial frequently asserts his admiration, and who is often credited with inspiring the tigers that Mr. Dial so often employs as symbols of African American resilience—saw his God-given gift as a vehicle for achieving the Lord’s liberatory design. His singing in the 1940s and 1950s—like Mr. Dial’s artistry today—offered a guide in the ongoing struggle.45
When Thornton Dial reflects on the patterns of history, he is doing more than merely revealing the ordered unfolding of God’s plan; he is also offering lessons for stepping into those patterns, and thus for realizing this divine design. “The struggles that we all have did, those struggles can teach us how to make improvement for the future,” he asserts. “Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world. It can lead peoples through the darkness.” Hence his many pieces with trenchantly political messages, pieces like Graveyard Traveler/Selma Bridge, Slave Ship, Refugees Trying to Get to the United States, The Last Day of Martin Luther King (fig. 3.8), and The Old Ku Klux: After All Their Fighting, Where’s the Profit? (fig. 5.15). Mr. Dial clearly sees the act of “leading people through the darkness” as his spiritual duty—as both a responsibility that comes with his gifts and an opportunity to advance humankind one step closer to God’s kingdom. “Ain’t but one thing you can do,” he says, reflecting on his special commission as an artist. “[You can] leave something for somebody else. You can work for somebody else’s freedom. You can leave something for somebody else’s child. This is life.”46
Thornton Dial’s works on paper—and particularly those created during his early explorations in this medium—do not initially seem as explicitly political as the sculptures cited above. Yet they nonetheless inhabit the same testimonial domain, in that they too speak to patterns of divine design. For Mr. Dial, messages that outsiders might read as “political” (conveyed by pieces with titles that explicitly invoke, for instance, the civil rights movement, labor struggles, or the Klan) represent only one dimension of God’s overarching plan—a dimension that Mr. Dial sees as no more or less important than its counterparts. Other messages (like those communicated in so many of Mr. Dial’s unnamed works on paper, or in his generally titled Life
Figure 3.8 Thornton Dial, The Last Day of Martin Luther King (1992). Wood, carpet, rope carpet, wire screen, metal pans, broken glass, broom, mop cords, cloth, string, enamel, and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 80 × 113 ½ × 4 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
Goes On series) speak more subtly but no less pointedly of God’s will and humankind’s path; in so doing, they too offer a way “through the darkness.” Richard Dial made precisely this point one afternoon when sitting with his father and viewing images of works that bring humans, tigers, birds, and fish together in graceful communion. Speaking specifically of drawings that depict tigers intertwined with women (plate 11, for example), he remarked:
That vision—
that Spirit that dwells in him to be able to create like that—
came from another side.
You know, because we normally would view something like that
as being,
“that tiger done ate that lady up,” or
“he [is] fixing to eat her up.”
And now you can kind of see the other side,
which the Lord kind of worked through Daddy to show us—
that on the other side, it’s a peaceful place.”47
Richard Dial suggests that in offering these pictures of serene coexistence, Thornton Dial is presenting a portrait of possibility, a vision of heaven’s peace. In this light, the images of harmonious communion that mark so many of Mr. Dial’s works on paper are not fundamentally different from those that chronicle historical hardships; all fall on the continuum of God’s plan for humankind. All of these pieces, in other words, offer lessons for living a life that pleases God, a life that “goes on,” ever moving humanity one step further toward sublime spiritual fulfillment. Though the path is not always self-evident—and, as Mr. Dial is quick to remind his viewers, is often marked more by stumbling than by easy advance—it is nonetheless there for the discerning eye to see. By presenting moments drawn from different points on this journey—whether starkly political indictments of racist practice, or tranquil visions of social harmony— Mr. Dial offers a variety of ways to access the path, and to claim one’s place in its unfolding.
As Thornton Dial moves into what he sees as his final years, he spends a lot of time reflecting on the changes he has seen over the past eight decades. Some are as seemingly simple as paved roads and air travel; others are as tortuously complex as improved relations between African Americans and whites. He looks back at his own life in the midst of these transformations and sees a path whose trajectory has been one of ever-increasing blessings, and of ever-increasing opportunities to contribute to humankind’s forward march. “He meant for me to show it,” Mr. Dial reflects. “That’s the whole story of the whole art.” And in showing what the Lord has asked him to show, in offering his art as revelatory testimony, Thornton Dial sees himself as fulfilling both his duty and his destiny.
At the opening of this essay, I mentioned that Thornton Dial’s children often tell the story of their sister Patricia’s prophetic return, recognizing in that moment a dramatic shift in their father’s spiritual journey. They also reflect openly on the ways that the Lord acts through their father’s art, conveying messages that speak at some moments with clarity and at others with indirection, revealing things to be understood both in the now and in the future. At the close of one of our conversations, Richard Dial offered a meditation that tellingly brought these two themes together, and then took them one step further. He began by talking about his father’s creativity:
He had to [have] went through some kind of change in that
particular time period.
I mean, [his creativity] had to [have] always been there,
but for him to be able to reach down and pull those things up . . .
And it’s like . . .
seemed like it was God,
God’s opportunity also.
’Cause you kind of look at things like that—
the end of the world—
you lost your job,
you just lost your daughter—
your whole life changed.
And then it was God’s opportunity to kind of like, say,
“Okay, now this [is] My opportunity.
I’m going to show y’all something through Mr. Dial that
I just want the other side of the world to be able to see.”
And He kind of came through in some of these things—
that’s the way some of the beauties of heaven was able to get
through to here.
And you can see that in some of that work right there.48
As Richard Dial spoke, his father just nodded. Some of his work will make you think. And some of it will just make you wonder, as it so often has for Thornton Dial himself, as he watches the beauties of heaven emerging from his hand. “Now, who’s going to tell me how to do that?” Mr. Dial asked, with a smile of certainty gracing his face. “Nobody but the Lord.”
NOTES
1 All of the unattributed Thornton Dial quotations in the opening section of this essay come from a recorded conversation between Mr. Dial and Glenn Hinson in Bessemer, Alabama, May 11, 2010. I present some of the longer sequences, as the one quoted here, in a lined-out format, where the pauses and parallel structures that so often mark well-spoken talk are foregrounded in separate and sequenced lines. Such formatting recognizes the ways that the elegance of performed talk often vanishes when words crafted to be heard are transformed into text to be read. By lining out Mr. Dial’s words, I hope to slow down readers’ eyes, inviting them to imaginatively hear the words as they were initially spoken, and thus to experience a measure of the drama of their original delivery. I use italics—as in the final line of this quoted passage—to indicate articulated emphasis, conveyed through intonation, facial expression, and accompanying gestures. Such lined-out transcriptions are increasingly common in ethnographic treatments of the spoken word; the roots of this practice lie in the pioneering work of sociolinguists Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes. See Dennis Tedlock, “On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative,” in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), 114–33; and Dell Hymes, “Discovering Oral Performance and Measured Verse in American Indian Narrative,” in “In Vain I Tried To Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 309–41.
2 In 1990, Thornton Dial visually addressed his late daughter’s connectedness with the Lord in his work Don’t Make Fun at What You See, An Angel Watches Over the Handicapped, which portrays an angel watching over Patricia; an image of this work appears in Harriet Whelchel and Margaret Donovan, eds., Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 81.
3 According to the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations, the 1982 unemployment figure for Bessemer averaged 33.1 percent, though it peaked at a staggering 38.7 percent in October of that year. The following year, it slid down only slightly to 29.2 percent (though 1983 began at 37.8 percent). (For a fuller breakdown of these figures, see the Local Area Unemployment Statistics Unit file, Alabama Department of Industrial Relations, Research and Statistics Division, Montgomery, Ala., 1989.) Public Affairs scholar Douglas J. Watson suggests that Bessemer’s unemployment figure for this period was 35 percent (The New Civil War: Government Competition for Economic Development [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995], 49).
4 In this sequence, Mr. Dial’s repeated “you know” phrase emerged not as automatically uttered filler but rather as decisive assertion underlining the importance that he was placing on his words. In standard paragraph form, much of the pointedness (as well as the poetic framing) of this passage would be lost.
5 A number of critics go so far as to actively set Thornton Dial apart from artists who associate their creativity with divine guidance. Art historian and curator Jane Livingston, for instance, contrasts his careful “application of mind” with other vernacular artists’ claims of inspiration or visions. Historian and art critic Thomas McEvilley, in turn, argues that Mr. Dial’s work is “not overtly religious” (though McEvilley does find in it the attitude of “revolutionary patience” that Cornel West sees as fundamental to African American Christianity). Standing apart from these interpretations is that of religious studies scholar Theophus Smith, who points out the error in separating artists’ overt spirituality from their political acuity, an error that seems to plague many critical assessments of Thornton Dial’s work. See Jane Livingston, “An Artist in the Twenty-First Century,” in Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, ed. Paul Arnett, Joanne Cubbs, and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, in association with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2005), 301–2; Thomas McEvilley, “Proud Stepping Tiger: History as Struggle in the Work of Thornton Dial,” in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 8–31, quotation on 17–18; and Paul Arnett, William Arnett, Robert Hobbs, Theophus Smith, and Maude Southwell Wahlman, “The Hidden Charms of the Deep South,” in The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf, vol. 1 of Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, ed. Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The New York Public Library, 2000), 98.
6 One is reminded here of Mr. Dial’s rather sardonic comment to a curator who was pressing him on the deeper meanings of his art: “I don’t know nothing about art, lady. I just makes the stuff. Y’all can make up the stories if y’all want to” (William Arnett, “The Root Sculptures of Thornton Dial: ‘A Network of Ideas,’” in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 1:176). While this remark might be read as a strategic display of naïveté (as Bill Arnett does in the aforementioned essay), it could also be taken as a rather trenchant remark on cultural outsiders’ penchant for imposing meanings on Mr. Dial’s art. And just as outsiders often “make up the stories,” so too do they leave other stories out. Such seems to be the case for Mr. Dial’s attestations about his faith.
7 An image of God’s Womb appears here as fig. 3.4 and in Once That River Starts to Flow, vol. 2 of Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, ed. William Arnett and Paul Arnett (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The New York Public Library, 2001), 197; the Sanctified Dancing works are in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 138–39; and Keeping Jesus Christ Alive appears in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 76. See also Mr. Dial’s 1993 painting Don’t Make Fun at What You See, An Angel Watches Over the Handicapped, in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 81. Finally, see his 2003 works, Creation Story; Out of the Darkness, the Lord Gave Us Light; and The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle, in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 191, 73, 74–75. Paul Arnett incisively discusses the latter two works in “Self-Taut: On Dial’s Style,” in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 125–27. For some of Mr. Dial’s tellingly suggestive remarks about his faith, see his comments in Paul Arnett and William Arnett, “The Works,” in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 127; and in William Arnett, “Root Sculptures of Thornton Dial,” 172.
8 Thornton Dial seemingly goes out of his way to tell this story whenever the opportunity arises. For instance, when he spoke at the Funders’ Dinner at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), for the opening of the exhibit Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, he pointedly offered this narrative. He also told the story to documentary filmmaker Celia Carey in the very first of many interviews that she conducted with him for the documentary Mr. Dial Has Something to Say. See Thornton Dial, recorded remarks at the Funders’ Dinner, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 14, 2005, “Funders Dinner” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes, Tape 54, p. 5, for the text of Mr. Dial’s remarks at the MFAH event; and Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Celia Carey and William Arnett, “Dial Workshop and Kitchen Interview 1” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes (2005), Tapes 1 and 2, p. 13, for the version of the story that he told to Celia Carey.
9 Drawn from field notes from a telephone conversation with William Arnett, May 15, 2010.
10 The discussion that follows draws its inspiration from long-standing conversations among folklorists interested in vernacular belief. See particularly the paradigm-shifting work of David Hufford on what he terms “traditions of disbelief,” “Traditions of Disbelief,” New York Folklore 8, no. 3/4 (1982): 47–55; and “The Supernatural and the Sociology of Knowledge: Explaining Academic Belief,” New York Folklore Quarterly 9, no. 1/2 (1983): 21–31. See also the discussion about academic approaches to the supernatural in Glenn Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 327–34.
11 While this approach virtually defines the professional art world’s presentation of those whom it embraces as “contemporary” artists, it begins to waver when presenting artists designated as “folk,” “self-taught,” or “outsider.” Such labeling, carrying with it an overlay of social distance and seemingly requisite othering, tends to shift the presentational approach toward that of the “folk art” market, yielding an exaggerated focus on artists’ presumed religiosity. Hence, the spiritual beliefs of “contemporary” (and often academically trained) artists typically earn little curatorial comment, while those of artists designated as “outsiders” often become the focus of biography-defining attention. There are, of course, many exceptions to this dichotomy; nonetheless, the pattern is strikingly well-established.
12 One need only note the ubiquity of the term “visionary” in writings about self-taught art to recognize the pervasiveness of this practice; the term—with its explicit invocation of religious visions—is frequently used to define both artists and their work, often with little reference to the artists’ own experiential accounts. This definitional practice—as sociologist Julia Ardery notes in her discussion of Kentucky carver Edgar Tolson—points to a broader tendency in the self-taught art market to highlight artists’ presumed religiosity. Observing that collectors of nonreligious art seemed particularly drawn to Tolson’s religiously themed carvings, she suggests that “religiosity seems a quality expected of folk artists” (Julia S. Ardery, The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998], 261). Curator Joanne Cubbs and art scholar Eugene Metcalf independently unpack this “expectation” as a mode of social “othering,” wherein artists designated as “outsiders” are narratively distanced from those who claim the power to impose such definitions; Cubbs describes this practice as a “relentless fetishizing of difference.” See Joanne Cubbs, “Rebels, Mystics, and Outcasts: The Romantic Artist Outsider,” in The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, ed. Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 76–93; and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr., “From Domination to Desire: Insiders and Outsider Art,” in Hall and Metcalf, Artist Outsider, 212–27. Sociologist Gary Alan Fine also addresses this process of exaggerated “othering,” arguing that the “outsider art” market is particularly adept at embellishing—if not fabricating outright—artists’ biographies (Gary Alan Fine, Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004], 73–74).
13 Perennially invoked in the “discovery” of hidden Africanisms in African American vernacular art is art historian Robert Farris Thompson, whose many writings on this issue have shaped both scholarly and public conversation about artistic and spiritual continuities between Africa and the Americas. Especially influential is Thompson’s often-cited work Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); see also Thompson’s The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981) and Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993). Thompson’s students have elaborated and extended his arguments in their own scholarly work; see particularly Maude Southwell Wahlman’s “African Charm Traditions Remembered in the Arts of the Americas,” in Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. Charles Russell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 146–65; and Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001). On yard displays, see Grey Gundaker, Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); and Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie, The Spirit of African American Yard Work (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005).
14 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, Bessemer, Alabama, September 12, 2010.
15 In keeping with widespread use in African American churches, and with Thornton Dial’s own referencing, I use masculine pronouns when referring to the Holy Spirit throughout this essay. Although many believers now invoke the Spirit in both masculine and feminine terms, the masculine “He” remains the vernacular norm.
16 Thornton Dial captured some of the spirited exuberance of this world of worship in his two Sanctified Dancing works, both created in 1992; images of both appear in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 138–39.
17 This account of Thornton Dial’s early experiences as a Christian draws upon recorded conversations between Thornton Dial and Glenn Hinson on May 11 and September 12, 2010; between Thornton Dial, Glenn Hinson, Dan Dial, Richard Dial, and Mattie Dial on May 11, 2010; between Thornton Dial, Richard Dial, Dan Dial, and Jeffery McCormick on May 12, 2010; and between Thornton Dial, Bernie Herman, William Arnett, and Matt Arnett on April 15, 2010; all of these conversations took place in Bessemer, Ala. The “crazy about the Lord” comment comes from the September 12 conversation; and Mr. Dial’s remarks about the Spirit come from the May 11 conversation with Glenn Hinson.
18 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010.
19 The comment on blessings comes from Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010; that on being in Christ comes from a Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, September 12, 2010.
20 For a fuller discussion of vernacular understandings of spiritual gifts among African American churchgoers, see Hinson, Fire in My Bones, 211–12.
21 Thornton Dial, from recorded conversations with Celia Carey, “Working on Sculpture” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes (2005), Tape 7, Shoot 2, p. 4; and with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010.
22 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010; Thornton Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 2:199.
23 Cited in Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 156. Thornton Dial materially captured this ethos of observing and gathering in his 2002 sculpture Walking with the Pickup Bird (fig. 1.4), which portrays two figures pushing a wheelbarrow filled with discarded and “picked up” materials (see Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 187). Folklorist Bernard Herman discusses this piece and sets it within the broader framework of Mr. Dial’s artistic commentaries on quilting and recycling, in “Creation Story: Thornton Dial’s Quilt Histories,” in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 218–19.
24 Mr. Dial made this comment when describing his 1988 painting God’s Womb (fig. 3.4), declaring, “This is how the world look in the beginning, God making a great piece of art.” Both the painting and his remark appear in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 2:197.
25 This sequence from a telephone conversation between Thornton Dial and William Arnett on July 29, 1995, appears in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 1:172. Maude Wahlman transcribed the conversation and lined it out for publication; I’ve slightly edited her formatting here.
26 Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” 220. The notion of God providing patterned templates for humans to follow has long been a theme in Thornton Dial’s conversations. Almost a decade before the publication of these comments, Paul and William Arnett quoted him as saying: “Man can’t build nothing without something that give him the idea for it. He got to have a pattern. . . . The Lord gave man knowledge enough to build many things. He laid things out as examples for man to go by. That’s the truth. Patterns” (Whelchel and Donovan, Thornton Dial, 127).
27 The “struggling time” comment comes from Edward M. Gomez, “You Pick It Up and Make Art Out of It,” ARTNews, October 2005, 155. For a fuller explication of Thornton Dial’s views on the history of hardship suffered by African Americans, see Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” esp. 196–98.
28 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, September 12, 2010. Seven years prior to these remarks, Thornton Dial captured this same sentiment in his piece Out of the Darkness, the Lord Gave Us Light (fig. 3.5), which appears in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 73.
29 Thornton Dial’s comment about being gifted comes from a recorded conversation with Celia Carey, “Dial Interview Part 1” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes (2005), Tape 32, p. 18, with emphasis added to the transcribed remarks. Richard Dial’s question comes from a recorded conversation with Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Glenn Hinson, Dan Dial, and Mattie Dial, Bessemer, Alabama, May 11, 2010.
30 Richard Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, Thornton Dial, Dan Dial, and Jeffery McCormick, Bessemer, Alabama, May 12, 2010.
31 Richard Dial, fieldnotes from a conversation with Glenn Hinson, Thornton Dial, and Dan Dial, Bessemer, Alabama, May 10, 2010; recorded conversation with Hinson et al., May 12, 2010.
32 Mr. Dial’s memories of this time suggest the struggle that he faced trying to keep his family afloat. He told one interviewer in 2005: “My job was cut clean off, and they retired me too. And that’s hurting me too, because I was used to working, you know. So I did went to the full-time work for myself. And that wasn’t nothing. I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I [was] just working” (Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Celia Carey, “Kitchen Interview” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes, 2005, Tape 3, Shoot 1, p. 15). Thornton Dial refers to this period in his precisely titled piece from 2000, Working at Home (fig. 3.6); this piece also appears in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 194.
33 Richard Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 12, 2010.
34 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010.
35 Richard Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 11, 2010.
36 Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” 220, with the lining-out added here to foreground the emphatic layering of Mr. Dial’s remarks.
37 The 1989 remark appeared in a 1991 article in the German journal Kunstforum International and is cited in Livingston, “An Artist in the Twenty-First Century,” 301. The “art is about ideas” assertion comes from Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” 220; the attributions of these ideas to the Lord comes from Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010, and recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 11, 2010.
38 Thornton Dial’s understanding of the Holy Spirit’s engagement with his creativity finds confirmation in the way that he once described a successful painting, declaring, “You could sing that picture, you could preach that picture.” Art scholar Paul Arnett insightfully suggests that this remark references the cross-pollination of performance and painting in vernacular art (Paul Arnett, “Painting Out of a Corner,” in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 1:483). What’s equally striking about this comment, though, are the performance forms that Mr. Dial invokes, both of which are gift-laden realms of religious expression. In essence, Mr. Dial suggests that a painting is like a song or sermon; the three realms find unity in their reliance on, and celebration of, the Holy Spirit. Mr. Dial’s “born to be an artist” comment comes from Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 11, 2010.
39 Both quotations come from Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010. Many commentators have mentioned Thornton Dial’s tendency to sing gospel songs while he works (see, for instance, Paul Arnett, “Facing X Tradition,” in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 2:19). Mr. Dial himself speaks of singing as an almost integral part of his creative practice, observing: “Anytime a person doing something, he just—he doing more than just drawing. He doing things through by the Spirit. And that’s the way the Spirit will hit you sometimes. Sometimes, the Spirit hit you and it just—you got to sing the song! Oh yeah. I have been right in here, and I have sung a lot of songs that I have, you know, just drawing, just working. And that’s where the Spirit will hit you” (Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010).
40 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010.
41 Both of these quoted remarks come from Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 11, 2010.
42 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson, May 11, 2010.
43 Thornton Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 12, 2010. Many scholars have remarked on Mr. Dial’s commitment to communicating history’s lessons to a broad public. William Arnett, for instance, says about some of the public figures that appear in Mr. Dial’s works, “Dial didn’t pass judgment on his new subjects, however, because to him everyone is part of ‘the Lord’s plan,’ acting out predetermined roles. Dial prefers to consider himself a recorder, a reporter, and a reliable witness, but not the judge” (William Arnett, “O. J. and Di: Heroes Through the Looking Glass,” in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 2:227). While I would challenge Arnett’s reading of predetermination (a perspective that robs these actors of their individual wills), I would wholly endorse his insight about Dial as a public witness. See also Paul Arnett, “Self-Taut,” esp. 120– 24; and Livingston, “An Artist in the Twenty-First Century,” 301, for discussions of Mr. Dial’s visual storying of history.
44 Folklorist and labor historian Brenda McCallum, who insightfully charts the intertwined links between faith, labor organizing, and gospel singing in the Birmingham/Bessemer area from the 1910s through the early 1950s, notes that “Tiger” Thompson served for twenty-three years as the vice president of USWA local 1476; during this period, he apparently changed the name of the Sterling Jubilee Singers (whom he managed) to the CIO Singers, thus formally asserting the integral connectedness between gospel singing and union activity. McCallum also documents the activities of a host of other union-connected gospel quartets, including the Bessemer Big Four Quartet and Bessemer’s Volunteer Four quartet (Brenda McCallum, “The Gospel of Black Unionism,” in Songs about Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss, ed. Archie Green, Special Publications of the Folklore Institute, no. 3, [Bloomington: Folklore Institute, Indiana University, 1993], esp. 120–23). For a fuller discussion of gospel-singing traditions in the broader Birmingham area, see Doug Seroff, Birmingham Quartet Scrapbook: A Quartet Reunion in Jefferson County, booklet for a program at the Birmingham City Auditorium, October 12, 1980 (Montgomery: Alabama State Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1980).
45 Thornton Dial’s admiration for Perry “Tiger” Thompson is well documented. Paul Arnett, for instance, speaks of Mr. Dial’s “veneration” for Thompson, calling him “Dial’s personal culture hero” (“Facing X Tradition,” 19). This assessment is certainly borne out in Mr. Dial’s own comments. “He was fighting for the CIO union, and he was fighting for the rights of the people,” he remarked in 1996; “if you is a tiger . . . you still going to struggle” (cited in William Arnett, “Root Sculptures of Thornton Dial,” 187); see also Mr. Dial’s remarks in Kathy Kemp and Keith Boyer, Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists (Birmingham: Crane Hill Publishers, 1994), 34. Other accounts of Mr. Dial’s respect for Thompson appear in William Arnett, “O. J. and Di,” 226; Paul Arnett, “Self-Taut,” 122; and John Beardsley, “His Story/History: Thornton Dial in the Twentieth Century,” in Arnett, Cubbs, and Metcalf, Thornton Dial in the 21st Century, 287.
46 Mr. Dial’s reflection on the lessons that emerge from struggle comes from Dial, “Mr. Dial Is a Man Looking for Something,” 221. His comment on his commission as an artist comes from his recorded conversation with Celia Carey, “Dial Interview Part 1” transcript, Alabama Public Television—Thornton Dial Tapes (2005), Tape 32, p. 4.
47 Richard Dial, recorded conversation with Glenn Hinson et al., May 12, 2010. Richard Dial elaborates on this point in his comments at the conclusion of this essay, where he describes his father’s works on paper as offering a foretaste of the “beauties of heaven,” suggesting that they present a vision of heaven’s wonders.
48 Ibid.
Plate 35
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
30 ¼ × 22 ¾ in. (76.8 × 57.8 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
L2010.22.4
Plate 36
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
29 ¾ × 22 in. (75.6 × 55.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
L2010.22.10
Plate 37
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
30 × 22 ⅝ in. (76.2 × 57.5 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
L2010.22.9
Plate 38
Fishing for Love, 1990
watercolor
30 × 22 ⅛ in. (76.2 × 56.2 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
L2010.22.8
Plate 39
Fishing for Love, 1990
watercolor
30 
× 21 ¾ in. (76.7 × 55.3 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
L2010.22.7
Plate 40
Fishing for Love, 1990
watercolor
30 × 21 ¾ in. (76.2 × 55.3 cm)
Ackland Art Museum. Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
2011.15.5
Plate 41
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
29 ⅝ × 22 ¼ in. (75.3 × 56.5 cm)
Courtesy of Martha Howard Collection
L2010.21.6
Plate 42
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
29 ⅝ × 22 in. (75.3 × 56.4 cm)
Courtesy of Martha Howard Collection
L2010.21.2
Plate 43
Two Ladies with a Big Fish
watercolor
29 ¾ × 22 ⅜ in. (75.6 × 56.8 cm)
Courtesy of Mr. Tom L. Larkin
L2010.20.2
Plate 44
Ladies Hold the Fish for Love, 1991
watercolor
29 
× 21 ⅞ in. (75.4 × 55.6 cm)
Courtesy of Mr. Tom L. Larkin
L2010.20.4
Plate 45
Fishing for Love, 1991
watercolor
22 ⅛ × 30 ¼ in. (56.2 × 76.8 cm)
Courtesy of Mr. Tom L. Larkin
L2010.20.11