Terri Sewell: “Today I rise to honor one of America's most prolific and self-taught artists, Mr. Thornton Dial of Bessemer, Alabama.…”

“Today I rise to honor one of America's most prolific and self-taught artists, Mr. Thornton Dial of Bessemer, Alabama. Today at the age of 86, Thornton Dial has lived, worked, and created art in Alabama for his entire life. From childhood, Dial was creating symbolically dense pieces of art by using castaway objects, anything he could find in his environment: pieces of wire, scrap metal, bones, tree roots. He used his environment to define his environment. Dial's work provides a forceful and compelling narrative of the most insidious challenges and remarkable triumphs of African American history in the Deep South. His work contains layers of rich history and reflects on race and class struggles that he witnessed in the Deep South. Dial rose to prominence in the 1990s while in his sixties through his large-scale assemblages, paintings that were made of scrap metal, pipes, very interesting visual interpretation of the history and politics that he saw around him. Dial is described as having been one of the most amazing art biographies in art history. He is described as being a very quiet man, a listener who dressed impeccably. What he lacked in terms of formal education he more than made up for in his highly visual and historic vocabulary. Dial's created brilliance is truly illuminating and inspiring. Dial has stayed in Alabama in the heart of the Seventh Congressional District to live and work his entire life. He was born in 1928 in Sumter County, Alabama.…”