Dial Flip Book

Thornton Dial, Sr. (American, 1928–2016), Always in Your Face, 1994, pastel, charcoal,
and graphite on paper, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, As-
sociation Purchase, 2012.14.3
image courtesy of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

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NO RIGHT IN THE WRONG

What does it mean to respond to violence in the act of artmaking? Can one depict death, create
an image of terror, as one’s own—purport to own the anguish? We, the viewer, understand such
representations as a fictive creation, albeit one referential to the factual, traumatic event. But to
the artist, can the attempt to capture such scenes be a means to emotionally connect with the
struggles (and victories) underneath such events and claim them as their own?

I suppose the question, then, is not of the weight of the baton as it lands on one’s head nor the
thud of a police boot as it smashes into one’s ribs. I am not talking here of physical pain. No
brushstroke of paint or line drawn by pencil can properly convey the pain that travels from the
point of impact to one’s gut, lodging itself in the belly—meaning here not the physical place, but
rather some place that can only be described as one’s spirit. Is this happening to me? This is hap-
pening to me.

Instead, the image here serves as a mirror—each move on the picture plane a reflexive searching
for where we are in the suffering. Each blow, and therefore, each scar, each bruise, each stream
of blood, symbolizing not physical damage but a quest to locate oneself within the physical and
spiritual being of the victim.

Where am I in Rodney King?

Shaun Leonardo - Rodney King, Before
BLM, 2017, charcoal on paper, with mir-
rored tint on frame, 30 x 45 in. Collection
of the Smithsonian National Museum of
African American History and Culture
purchased with funds provided by the
Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, ad-
ministered by the Smithsonian Latino
Center

In Thornton Dial’s No Right in the Wrong (1992), however, we do not see Rodney King nor his
beating at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department—three officers to be exact, with
another eight witnesses. Instead, we see its aftermath—homes aflame as one tormented
woman stands amidst the destruction of the surrounding uprising. Occupying the same spa-
tial weight as the lone figure and towering over houses, we also see two looming mythical
creatures—possible stand-ins for violent actors or potential harbingers of something worse to
come?

The title of the work would Shaun Leonardo - Freddy Perreira (drawing 2), 2019
presume some judgment of Charcoal on paper with mirrored tint on frame
the depicted scene or maybe 53.5 by 52.5 in. photo courtesy of the artist
a melancholic visualization of
“Can we all just get along?”,
as King lamented during a
television appearance during
the height of the protests. And
yet, I still contend that what
we see here moves beyond
the fictive illustration of
violence. It is the effect of fear
and sorrow itself. Not
representation, but rather, a
conceptual and philosophical
(internal) struggle with a
moment in time, and
therefore, with oneself.

Where am I in the flames?

The thing about righteous rage is that it acts as both revolt and affirmation. In the flames we
see both destruction and renewal. Is it possible, then, that we may look at Thornton Dial’s
title as not a statement but a question? With each streak of color, we see someone looking
for meaning.

As Mr. Dial said, “One thing you can do is leave something for somebody else. You can work
for somebody else’s freedom… This is life.” (Mr. Dial Has Something to Say, Alabama Public
Television, 2007)
I prefer to see No Right in the Wrong as a gift rather than a testament. In its frenetic
vibrancy, controlled chaos, the painting asks me to keep looking—to keep utilizing the work
as mirror for my own questioning amidst the blaze. Mr. Dial, thus, gives me permission to
continue to search for meaning in this history of violence—to see into the threat, the
aggression, the fear, the screams, the destruction—as it continues to manifest today…
and permission to pick up a brush or a pencil to find meaning.

- Shaun Leonardo

Shaun Leonardo - Keith Lamont Scott (drawings 1-3), 2017
each 8.5 x 11 in. photo courtesy of the artist

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I, too, am America.

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I, TOO

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

- Langston Hughes, from The Weary Blues, 1926

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HOODOO PEOPLE: WE KNOW

THEM WHEN WE SEE THEM

Raised in Pittsburgh by spiritual but non-religious parents, I had never been indoctrinated
with the fear that many African Americans have when it comes to other religions or spiritual
belief systems outside of the realm of Christianity, especially if those beliefs and practices
have their origins on the African continent, homeland of our enslaved Ancestors. Little did I
know that that early religious freedom would set me off on a spiritual journey where I’d
meet many kindred spirits along the way.

“Madame Ching”, in hand-painted red and white block letters, arching across the window
of a three-story row house on Perry Street is what I notice first, then the frail, old, brown-
skinned women in the head wrap and long skirt sitting on the stoop below, staring at me
and my friend David as we pass. Curious to know more about the woman and the sign, I
ask, David who lives a few doors down from her. His response is dismissive, something to the
effect of “Oh she’s weird, people stay away from her. They say she’s a witch.” It’s clear that
all he knows is the fear, whispers, and rumors that circle about her within the community, the
way they always do wherever the Hoodoo People reside, in the north, south, east, or west.
That only makes me more curious about her, but she’ll remain a mystery for the time being.

Four years later, in 1985, I arrive in Washington DC, aka “Chocolate City”, looking for better
opportunities as an emerging artist. I discover the Clover Horn Spiritual Supply store on the
corner of 14th and Euclid Streets, northwest and its proprietress, Ms. Mayfield. The first time I
walk into her shop, she gives me the same intense stare Madame Ching had given me four
years earlier. As I move about Clover Horn under Ms. Mayfield’s watchful eye, I feel a little
vulnerable, but not fearful. It was a feeling that these women could read you. However, my
curiosity overrides any discomfort I feel about being the focus of such intense observation. I
suspect that it’s obvious to her that I’m a newcomer.

Rows on top of rows of jars stretch across the walls from floor to ceiling, each with a hand-
written label identifying herbal contents such as “Five Finger Grass”, Life Everlasting” and Sol-
omon’s Seal. Present is every ingredient you would need or want for healing remedies…or

conjuring. My eyes zero in on a huge jar labeled “High John the Conqueror Root”, and I
think “There it is, my Holy Grail” as I hear the lyrics to Muddy Water’s Hoochie Coochie Man
playing in my head…” I got a black cat bone, I got a mojo too, I got the Johnny
Concheroo, I'm gonna mess with you…”

As I’m exploring, other people come

and go. Each approach the counter,

behind which, Ms. Mayfield is perched

on a high stool. They speak in barely

audible whispers that I strain to hear,

while trying not to look obvious in my

eavesdropping. Each time, she leaves

her stool to retrieve a jar or two from

one of the shelves and brings them

back to the counter. As she uses a

series of scoops to shovel quantities of

various powders and herbs into small

brown paper bags, she quietly gives Renée Stout - Dreams Come True, 2007
instructions: “Take two teaspoonfuls of Archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches, courtesy of the artist

this and mix it with half a cup of hot

water”, then her voice becomes lower so I can’t make out the rest of the prescription.

I suddenly feel guilty, like I’m prying in on private consultations, but at the same time, I am

fascinated.

I leave Clover Horn that day with a tiny jar of orange-colored powder called “Graveyard
Dust”, a slightly larger jar of clear, greenish tinted oil, labeled “Power Oil” and a big ‘ol,
pungently fragrant High the Conqueror Root. That would be the first of many visits over the
years and the start of my collection of herbs, powders, roots, and oils, some of which would
find their way into my work.

Fast forward to 2002. I am in Kansas City helping to install a one-person show I’m having at
the Belger Arts Center, which features a “root store” installation that’s an homage to
Madame Ching, Ms. Mayfield (who is now the inspiration behind my current alter-ego) and
all of the other Hoodoo People, past and present who have kept those powerful African

spiritual traditions alive and helped to sustain our communities, spiritually and physically,
despite the judgement heaped upon them by the community’s “good Christians.”

Collectors Dick Belger and his companion Myra Morgan ask me if I would like to go out and
find some more things for my installation. I ask them to drive me to a black community. We
get into a car and drive to another part of the city, where we park on a main drag, get out
and start walking down the street past all manner of storefronts. They have no idea of what
it is that I’m searching for, and neither do I. We’re just strolling aimlessly. Eventually we
approach what looks to be a store selling vintage and second-hand furniture. I stop in my

tracks in front of it, just as a man comes out and
sets a chair on the sidewalk among the rest of
what’s out on display. We lock eyes. I approach
him and ask if he knows where I can find a root
store, explaining that I’m an artist doing an
installation and would like to include something
from a local root store. Now mind you, you can’t
just ask anyone a question like that.

Renée Stout - Lotus Root, 2018 A sly, knowing smile comes across the man’s face
Graphite drawing with collage and mixed-media, 11 x 8.5 inches, and his eyes seem to twinkle as he tells us to follow
collection of James Hall, courtesy of the artist him. Dick and Myra look puzzled, but they signed
on for this adventure, so they follow. He takes us to
the back of the store and through a door that
leads to a hallway and a set of stairs that we take
to the second floor. We arrive at another door
where he takes keys from his pocket to unlock it,
then reaches in to flip on a light. We step through
and suddenly I’m transported back to Clover Horn.
There are rows of jars along the walls filled with
herbs. The labels have been hand-written.

“Take whatever you want” he tells me. He explains that the store had recently closed,
because the woman who had run it had gotten too old. The place was to be cleaned out,
but they hadn’t yet gotten around to it. I don’t ask if he is related to her, I just graciously

take three large jars, each containing herbal combinations that are labeled “Arthritis”,
“Women’s Tea” and “Men’s Tea.” We thank the man and leave.
Once we’re out on the sidewalk, Dick and Myra ask me what had made me stop at that
furniture store, of all places, to ask about a root store. I tell them that I just knew that he
would know. It became clear to me then that Hoodoo People recognize each other.

- Renée Stout

CLEAN UP THIS
PHOTO!

Renée Stout - Hoodoo House, 2014-2022
Wood panel, wood construction, found windows, latex and acryl-
ic paint, found bottles containing organic materials, found and
handmade metal chain, mixed-media, 91 x 52 x 7 inches, courte-
sy of the artist

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ART IS STRANGE-LOOKING STUFF

For many years, on Saturdays and Sundays, after finishing his week’s shifts at the
Pullman-Standard plant, Thornton Dial would set up an unofficial, unisex hair
salon in his living room, charging something like seventy-five cents per cut (fifty
cents for children). Even as a part-time barber, he developed an extensive
clientele. “It seemed like half of Pipe Shop, and people from Southside, and as
far away as Birmingham,” his son Richard recalls. Each weekend, the Dial home
performed one of the Black barbershop’s venerable roles: as a space for social
trust where members of a community could feel comfortable to be themselves
and converse about topics ranging from local gossip to national politics. The
busy Black barber functioned thereby as a master of ceremonies. Thornton Dial,
in other words, could be found at the center of a marginalized locality, despite
which, in many other locales, he is still categorized as an “outsider” artist—a
sweeping social determination if ever there was one.

Can there be any such thing as a league or association, a barbershop, of
outsiders? (Art history’s most famous example remains the 1863 Salon des
Refusés, an exhibition in Paris of painters who, for reasons that probably
seemed cut-and-dried to gatekeepers of the time, were denied participation
in that year’s officially sanctioned Salon exposition. The rejects included Paul
Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Édouard Manet.) Thornton Dial, a late-twentieth
-century “outsider,” was friendly with, or else had firsthand familiarity with
artworks created by, fellow Black Southern artists Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter,
Purvis Young, Bessie Harvey, Mary T. Smith, Ralph Griffin, Mose Tolliver, James
“Son” Thomas, Joe Light, Hawkins Bolden, Archie Byron, Dinah Young, Emmer
Sewell, Charlie Lucas, H. D. Dennis, numerous Gee’s Bend quilters, and art-
making members of his own extended family—Thornton Jr., Richard Dial, Arthur
Dial, and Ronald Lockett—not to mention Bessemer-born Jack Whitten, who
visited with Dial on trips to his hometown. Moreover, Dial occasionally made
works in response to modern art he encountered in museums, including Anselm
Kiefer’s gigantic Böhmen liegt am Meer (1996) and Willem de Kooning’s Attic
(1949), which Dial saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Joseph Beuys’s

Felt Suit (1970), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ironically enough, after a visit to his local
museum, Dial also formulated blistering satires of nineteenth-century paintings by William
Merritt Chase and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the latter of whom is a paragon of the
academic French “Salon” style.

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react either to specific pieces by Black artists or to another edge
artist’s style, techniques, or media. A couple of years after
visiting Joe Minter’s “African Village in America,” where
Dial stood inside Minter’s outdoor memorial to Martin
Luther King Jr.’s famous stint in the Birmingham City Jail,
Dial created Changes of the Moon [FIG X] on the same
subject. His trippy Traveling the Dangerous Roads [FIG X]
seems to borrow vibes from Joe Light’s surrealistic
landscapes/mindscapes of the same period, while the
technicolor swirls in an untitled tiger painting from 1989 [FIG
X] surely reply, perhaps playfully, to Lockett’s 1988 and ’89
pooled-paint works on plywood. (Lockett’s pictures rely on
a more restricted palette.) And, having incorporated
aspects of the patchwork-quilt tradition into his art since
the late 1990s, in the mid-2000s he twice used anonymous,
well-worn, locally sourced quilts in toto [FIGS X and X], thus
citing an entire, multigenerational cultural tradition.

Most potently for Dial, these contacts awakened him to his participation in a broader,
grassroots movement of Black vernacular artists across the American South. Artists often find
a fertile tension between their sense of belonging to a collective and their own inner
imperatives. For Dial, his interactions with other art and artists dissolved, much like any of his
personal experiences and perceptions, into the things he made, typically without any overt
reference (yet without denials of influence, either). A late work, titled Feeding the Cupola
(2012), appears to propose a metaphor. A cupola is a cylindrical furnace for remelting
metal, usually iron, before casting in a foundry. In some ways, the cupola is the most
extreme form of recycling and repurposing. In artistic terms, molten perceptions, influences,

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and ideas—and anything found, or otherwise capable of being reprocessed—cool and are
cast into a new form: “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.” [FTN 1]

Most of what fed Dial’s “cupola” was art of his own making. (During the decades before his
emergence into public view, in 1987, the metamorphoses occurred literally. He recycled his
creations by breaking them down, as needed, into raw materials for newer constructions.) It
is a magnificent paradox that, as a so-called self-taught artist, Dial could teach himself rela-
tively little, but from his (prior) works he could learn almost anything. Whatever he was ca-
pable of teaching himself about art offers evidence only of his relative disadvantages; what
he learned about art from himself offers evidence of boundless democracy. Dial progressed
by becoming his own student. He was wont to say, “The more you do, the more you see to
do,” and he was committed to thematic, formal, and technical variation and experimenta-
tion, because, as he said time and again, “My art is evidence of my freedom.” [FTN 2].
Through his artistic practice, he released the radically political power of his “self-taught” sta-
tus. For this child of Jim Crow, doled a “separate but equal,” third-grade education, making
art—displaying his mind with material—was a species of liberation. And in making art that
insistently pressed toward richer, more trenchant insights, Dial acquired something possibly
more rarefied than freedom: creative autonomy. Which became the key to his greatest
achievements.

Dial’s was a dialectical process undertaken in a distinctive dialect, the southern Black ver-
nacular. Imagine a nascent mathematics expressed through yet-to-be-decoded symbols
and notation: “Art is strange-looking stuff and most people don’t understand art. Most peo-
ple don’t understand my art . . . because most people don’t understand me. . .. Art is sup-
posed to open your eyes. Art is for understanding.” [FTN 3]

For examples here, let’s look at tigers, Dial’s most widely known visual image. As it devel-
oped over time, the tiger became less allegorical and more reflexive, enacting relationships
between art, history, and artist. In this sense, the tiger undertook an aesthetic mission as well
as a sociopolitical one. The first tiger (1987) was a welded-metal construction portraying a
fearsome apex predator (with human bodies filling its belly) after it has been captured, dis-
placed from its native ecosystem, and reduced to a circus attraction or pet, presently on a
diet of chickens and rabbits that stand on its back and immobilize it. “The more you do, the

more you see to do”: Dial was quickly off to the races with the new tiger. Hauled from its an-
cestral range, the tiger was introduced into an altogether unfamiliar “jungle of the United
States,” where it needed to hide, or at least hide its power, to survive. Dial’s tigers in 1988
and ’89 explored Black American existence and the vagaries of intercultural relations, in-
cluding pervasive stereotypes and enduring mysteries—never better summarized than in
1989’s Nobody Know What Go on Behind the Jungle. Along the way, tigers also stood for
the artist and his autobiographical remembrances, while (invisibly) paying homage to one
of Dial’s personal heroes, a Bessemer man named Perry “Tiger” Thompson. The tiger fre-
quently embodied a male-type energy in romantic or domestic scenes. (Dial, whose sympa-
thies leaned feminist, often poked fun at men with his tigers.) And the tiger’s tensed might
and billowing stripes served as palimpsests for formal experiments in color and contrast, es-
pecially as a means to deliver optical effects of movement and a concentrated visual
pulse. (See Struggling Tiger [FIG X].)

Dial’s art’s march forward in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to track, with warp
speed, the century’s course. Perhaps inevitably, tigers became more than a Black Every-
man. They began to leave the jungle, so to speak, in order to participate in, and lead, social
change, reaching an apotheosis in The Last Day of Martin Luther King (1992), which con-
ceives the martyred civil rights leader as a great tiger (formed of what appear to be mop
strings) in a field of shattered glass. As Dial’s artistic ambition grew, and as he undertook ep-
ic-scale paintings on epic themes—e.g., political assassinations of the 1960s, plutocratic
economic control, race relations in Birmingham—the tiger’s physical presence, conversely,
often shrank and relocated to the pictures’ background or margins. This was Dial, acting on-
ly as observer, fully self-aware yet powerless except as a witness to, and artistic chronicler
of, far larger forces.

In the aftermath of his first solo museum exhibition, Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger
(presented jointly by the American Folk Art Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, in 1993), Dial found less and less to mine from his tiger. From 1994 on, tigers feature only
intermittently in his work, and sometimes participate only by implication—in animal-print fab-
rics, for example. (The tiger maintained a recurring role in Dial’s drawings, but that’s another
matter entirely.) The September 11, 2001, attacks briefly revived the big cat, in parallel with
a short-lived reemergence of national unity and common purpose. Beyond that, however,

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for the remainder of Dial’s career tigers were more often sighted in the wild than in his paint-
ings.

Dial’s philosophy of constant questioning and invention embraced, but was not limited to, a
dictum such as poet Charles Olson’s “What does not change / is the will to change.” [FTN?]
Dial’s creative restlessness prospered in the presence of its complement, his consistent goals.
Simply put, Thornton Dial was voraciously curious about life on Earth in all its diversity, abun-
dance, and messiness; at least as much as his reverence for freedom, this curiosity helps ac-
count for his incessant experimentation. He sought to put something akin to life and free-
dom into his art—just about the deepest, highest, and most romantic ambition there can be
if you’re an artist whose every signal from the society in which you live is to keep realistic
about your own prospects. The word “life”—freighted with anguishing trade-offs and com-
plications, tragedy, stoicism, irony, and struggle, it should be acknowledged—appears in
almost too many titles to count. The Black Tree of Life. Everybody Got a Right to the Tree of
Life. The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle. Life Go On in the Tiger’s Jungle. The Spirit of
Life. How Things Work: The Parade of Life (FIG X). Scrambling for Life. Scratching for Life (FIG
X). An Up and Down Life Picture (FIG X). Rough Road through the Beautiful Life. Grinder (The
Long Life of the Working Man). Hot and Cold (Life in the Rolling Mill). Pig’s Life. Pain and Joy
(Everyday Life) (FIG X). The Way of Life: The Freedom Picture. Changing the Life: Any Man
Can Move a Mountain (FIG X). People Who Looked for a Better Life and Didn’t Get It. By My-
self (Wondering about Life). And an endpoint: one of his final pieces, It’s Just Life (2015),
melted gray plastic on a black canvas, whose composition oscillates between near-
randomness and an unmistakable self-portrait.

In 1989, Dial created a panoramic, ten-foot-long panel to which he appended the four-part
title Life Picture; World Picture; Strategy; Hard Times and Tribulations (FIG X). This encyclope-
dic fable on survival and its psychological dimensions contains much of Dial’s menagerie
from his “early” period: tigers, representing courage and principle; a fox, representing
stealth; a monkey (or two), representing trickery; black dogs, representing instincts
(especially the baser ones); birds, representing flight or transcendence; and several colors of
humans (one with “TD” painted on its cheek), whose “strategies” embrace everything.
Twenty-six years later, in 2015, he made Migration (FIG X), another large work about the
need to survive, in this case by moving toward more desirable environments. Whereas the
figures in Life Picture occasionally blend together, overlap, or nest within each another

(evoking psychology brilliantly), Migration is a gallery of “strange-looking stuff” that is both
abstract and recognizably alive, while merely hinting at animals, birds, sea creatures, or hu-
mans moving en masse. Migration’s individuated, puzzle-piece-like elements approach cu-
neiform, a method of abstract notation, new math. Separated by decades of the artist’s
aesthetic journey, these two paintings are as different as can be, yet closely related. Life
seeks to survive, and something better.

After more than thirty years of writing about

Dial, I’m still learning that what I labor to com-

municate about his art “is right there,” already

communicating in its own voice. With that in

mind, I’ll let a small, early sculpture (FIG X) fin-

ish for me. Standing just shy of fifteen inches

tall, it is one of a group of untitled “can men,”

from 1988. The simple materials used are of the

kind Dial would typically have lying around: a

quart paint can; concrete (which fills the can);

Splash Zone compound (a hard, putty-like

product used for sealing metal pipes, but here

pinched into human facial features on the

can); two pieces of sheet metal (deftly

snipped); and both spray paint and household

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symbols for life and freedom: a stylized metal edge

sapling and a flickering cutout of a bird. And the young tree? Its form harmonizes perfectly

with Migration.

- Paul Arnett

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edge—MIGRATION

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AN IMMENSE PRESENCE

On July 27, 2021, several members of the AEIVA team (myself, Tina Ruggieri, and Sheleka
Laseter), exhibition curator Paul Barrett, and the entire production crew from Alabama
Public Television’s Monograph (including Jackie Clay) converged on the Dial family
household in McCalla, Alabama.

The heat index was 106°F and we were settling in for an entire day of interviews and filming.
Our primary goal was to conduct interviews with as many members of Thornton Dial’s family
as possible for inclusion in an upcoming episode of Monograph but also this book.

I picked up enough BBQ from Bob Sykes (a favorite of the Dial family) to feed a small army.
I gifted my personal copy of the Young Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists
catalog to Brandon Dial (grandson of Mr. Dial). And I listened for hours as Mr. Dial’s family
recounted the story of their patriarch for Jackie and the cameras. This was not my first time
interacting with members of Thornton Dial’s family, but it was the first time I had interacted
with ALL of the core family at once.

Thornton Dial’s presence was immense in the house that day and the love and admiration
of his closest loved ones was apparent in their every word. I bathed in their stories and
memories and idle chit chat.

See, everyone was there to conduct this series of filmed interviews. But for me, I had some-
thing else on my mind.

As a curator, for better or worse, I have always kept large aspects of the art world at arm’s
length. As a visual artist, I embrace vulnerability, and acknowledge the role it plays in
creativity. Out of more than 100 exhibitions I have worked on over the years, this one kept
me awake at night the most. I don’t need to explain the complicated history and art-world
politics that have surrounded Thornton Dial’s career for decades, because they have been
exhausted in so many other arenas. And so much of that is directly responsible for how we
arrived here, in 2022, celebrating one of Alabama’s greatest artistic treasures, Thornton Dial,
at long last with a major solo exhibition in his home state.

And yet, there I was, sitting by the pool with Richard Dial talking about an exhibition that
would attempt to bring together the family, the collectors, the institutions, the art dealers –
everyone would have a seat at the table for what can only be described as a
“Homecoming” for Mr. Dial. But for me, this has only ever been about satisfying the Dial
family and giving his friends and neighbors the opportunity to experience the artistic marvel
that is the work of Thornton Dial, something many Birmingham locals have only experienced
through magazines and books.
At one point, Richard looked at me, and said “John, this is your job, but this is our life. Do you
understand?” I did, which is why I hadn’t slept more than three consecutive hours at a time
for the preceding three months. He then followed up “but I feel good about everything.
I already feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” If this scene had been presented in a
movie, the audience would have groaned in agony over the melodrama of it all – I think
the sun was even starting to set a little bit (at least it was in my mind). But those were the
words exchanged. I definitely slept better that evening and I am grateful this exhibition and
book might play a small part in helping to bring Thornton Dial’s legacy back home.

- John Fields

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Editors

PAUL BARRETT

Paul Barrett focuses his curatorial projects on contemporary social issues and leading
collaborative community initiatives. As director of the photography and book-arts gallery,
AGNES, he curated exhibitions for Paul Caponigro, Elise Mitchell Sanford, and Jack Spencer.
At AGNES he supervised the reformatting ofAlabama's first statewide print art magazine,

, as its editor. Following a career in marketing for Microsoft, Kodak, and
LG Electronics, Barrett curated exhibitions featuring Zach Blas, Jakob Dwight, Jamey Grimes,
Ben Grosser, Tyree Guyton, Eric Rhein, and Robert Sherer as founding director of Stephen
Smith Fine Art. In 2017, the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham Civil Rights
Institute, Birmingham Public Library, and Birmingham Museum of Art jointly presented

a city-wide series of exhibitions and public programs about
discrimination and healthcare centering the works of artist, Jordan Eagles, in partnership

participation in the nationwide initiative. That year he curated

featuring works by Chris Clark, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Charlie Lucas, and quilters Mary

Lee Bendolph and Lucy T. Pettway of Gee's Bend. Barrett has curated exhibitions of the

work of Sheila Pree Bright, Jenny Fine, Al Sella, and Purvis Young, and traveling shows for

Sara Garden Armstrong, Beverly Buchanan, and Jerry Siegel. He organized a presentation of

Hank Willis Thomas' complete

(2019). He curated a traveling two-person show featuring works by Charlie Lucas and

Yvonne Wells called, (2021). Barrett curated

at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the VIsual Arts; at the

Samford University Art Gallery and forthcoming exhibitions at the Wiregrass Museum of Art

and the LSU Museum of Art; and at Maus Contemporary.

He currently serves as president of the board of the Alabama Visual Arts Network, a

statewide partner of the Alabama State Council on the Arts founded in 1968.

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REBECCA DOBRINSKI

Rebecca Dobrinski is the Scrum Master and Chief Content Officer at CAVU Benefit
Corporation, a multi-media professional development and Agile education platform, where
she manages the creation and publication of all on demand educational content. She
returned to Birmingham in 2003 to finish her BA in History at UAB, then went on to earn MAs
from SCAD (Historic Preservation) and UAB (History). She is the organizer emerita for
TEDxBirmingham and founder of F*ckUp Nights Birmingham, a member of Leadership

program, a Co.Starters graduate, a member of the inaugural cohort for the Birmingham

Entrepreneurship Academy, a speaking coach for events and private entrepreneurial

clients. Amongst many others, she copyedited the urban history textbooks

3rd Edition (2012) and 3rd Edition (2011),

both with co-editor Raymond A. Mohl, PhD. While at the Birmingham Museum of Art, she

edited the publications (2012) and

(2013), to which she also contributed an essay. Dobrinski

currently serves on the Entrepreneur and Practitioner Advisory Board for the Journal of Small

Business and Enterprise Development and the Board of Directors of Innovate Birmingham.

Authors
PAUL ARNETT
Paul Arnett is an art historian who specializes in Black art and artists of the American South.

projects and publications include

and He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

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MARGARET LYNNE AUSFELD
Margaret Lynne Ausfeld is the Senior Curator at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in
Montgomery, AL. She has been the curator of the collections at the MMFA since 1989.
Ausfeld is the author of
(2006) and has co-curated and authored the exhibitions and books

(1984);
(1999);

(2012); and
(2015).

MICHAELA PILAR BROWN
Michaela Pilar Brown is an image and object maker, a multidisciplinary artist using
photography, installation and performance. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard

Black body. She uses nontraditional materials and their juxtaposition to each other, and/or
dissimilar objects to make statements about the body and its relationship to larger cultural
themes of age, gender, race, sexuality, history, and violence. Her work considers memory,
myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes.
Brown won the grand prize at the ArtFields juried art competition (2018). She is the inaugural
resident artist of the Volcanic Residency, Whakatane Museum, Whakatane, New Zealand
(2018). She was one of the six American artists selected to participate as a Resident Artist for
OPEN IMMERSION: A VR CREATIVE DOC LAB produced by the CFC Media Lab, The National
Film Board of Canada (NFB) and JustFilms | Ford Foundation in Toronto, Canada, an
Inaugural Resident Artist (2016) at the Sedona Summer Colony and an Artist in Residence,
Kunstlerwerkgemeinschaft Kaiserslautern, Germany (2016), and has held residencies at the
Vermont Studio Center and the McColl Center for Art and Innovation. Her work can be
found in private and public museum collections in the United States. She is the Executive
Director of 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina, where she has
served since 2020.

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