LifeTimeline
Thornton Dial
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Thornton Dial is Born
Emelle , Alabama
Thornton Dial was born in 1928 in Emelle, Alabama, the state in which he would spend the rest of his life. Dial recounts his childhood in an autobiographical essay, which came out of interviews from 1995 and 1996. Dial never learned how to read.
"I was born in Sumter County, Alabama. A midwife delivered me to my mama in a little country house in the field, one of them kind you can lay down and look up through the ceiling and see the sunshine.
I was born on Luther Elliot's plantation. My great-granddaddy Rich Dial lived there, and his family. Phil, Pete, Will, Bryant, Mattie, Sarah, and Martha Jane were his children. They were sharecropping, picking cotton. They kept on farming and didn't ever come out of debt. The Man advance people from one end of the year to the other end. Every year the Man always say, 'You just about come out of debt this time but didn't quite make it.'
Rich Dial’s daughter Martha Jane was my grandmother. She married Gene Bell. They had my mother, named her Mattie—Mattie Bell. I never owned no daddy. My mama didn’t give me one. My mama told me once that my daddy was James Hutchins. My name supposed to be Bell, or Hutchins, but the Dials raised me and give me their name.
We picked cotton when we got big enough to walk. We go in front of my grandmama and pick cotton, and she carry the sack. We put it in her sack. She take a switch to us if we didn’t pick. I was just a little bitty something but I had to earn my way."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial) -
Dial's Childhood Home
Alabama
"I was raised up in a old house in the pasture. We moved to it, on land belonged to the white Dial family. I was about something like six or seven, and they pay me to run the mule around the hay baler. We was working for my cousin Buddy Jake Dial. He was bright skinned, almost white. His mother look like a Indian lady-long pretty black hair. He take the money I make and give it to my grandmama. I’d drive the milk cows up to the barn for Fanny Allison, Buddy Jake’s sister. Used to help milk.
Across the road was a house owned by Cousin Irma on land she owned with her brother Columbus and her sister they called Honey Bee. Irma married James Hutchins, the man that may be my daddy. They already had a house on that land, but James Hutchins built a new one, and added on a barn and the old pump house and the fences around the pasture."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial) -
Moves to Bessemer
Bessemer, Alabama
Dial was sent to live with relatives in Bessemer, Alabama in 1941. He left school at 12 to help his family work. The skills he obtained while working the farm and at the Pull Standard boxcar company -- carpentry, masonry, metal fabrication, welding -- would later appear in his art.
More from Dial's autobiographical essay:
"When I come to Bessemer about ’41, I was thirteen. Sarah Dial, my grand-mama’s sister, was living in Bessemer, married to Dave Lockett. They sent for me. I tried to go to Sloss’s Mining Camp school but the children made fun of me because I was so big, thirteen in the second grade and stuff like that. I didn’t know nothing, hadn’t been to school much, was more a man than a schoolboy. That was embarrassing. I went enough to learn a little bit. They told me, 'Learn to figure out your money and write your name: That’s as far as a Negro can go.'
I learned that. But it was just too embarrassing, all of them little children teasing me. I wasn’t just big; I looked 'country'—country hair and clothes and all that. I’d tell Auntie I’m going to school, but I’d sneak off and work, making money from the white folks. Not much, but I was enjoying doing something. Auntie never did know I wasn’t going to school. I’d join up with the children going to school and join them coming home from school. Lot of little fellows would lay out in the weeds drinking whiskey and shooting dice or flying kites all day long. I mostly worked."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial) -
Thornton Starts to Make Art (Without Even Knowing It)
Alabama
"I made little cars. Roads and trails in the sand. Roll them out with tin cans or a bottle. Build little houses. Make persons out of corn shucks. Build little hills, bridges. Me and Arthur [Dial's brother] done this underneath this old shade tree by Brown Chapel, this little church in Emelle [Dial's hometown in Sumter County]. Make little towns under the tree. 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. I did so much stuff back then.
I went to school a little bit, but mostly I just would sit there with the other boys, Archie Lee Pettigrew and a lot of them, and all of us drawed a lot; that’s why I didn’t learn too much. I was drawing pictures of Tarzan and cowboys and stuff like that I learned from the boys that went to the picture shows.
I always had the idea to draw. Put time at something like that you get better at it. I put in more time with drawing than I did with my lessons. Instead of being in my books I was into the drawing, and Professor King, the principal over the school, gave us so many ass-whippings. Back then, shoot, they whip you till you pee in your pants. So I quit school and went to work at the ice-house. It was more safe."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial) -
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Meets Bill Arnett
Alabama
Dial's life changed when he met artist Lonnie Holley and art collector William Arnett in 1987. Holley sought out Dial while searching for "outsider" artists from the South.
After meeting Dial, Holley introduced him to William Arnett, who saw something in Dial and his work. From that meeting on, Arnett would champion Dial's work for over 25 years, and bring it to a diverse and far-reaching audience for years to come. -
Dial's First Art Show
Georgia
"My first art show was back in ’90 at a college in Atlanta. Show was called Ladies of the United States. The folks seemed to respect my work to the highest, then the art writer at the Atlanta newspaper, she written that Mr. Dial can’t draw worth nothing and his art is ugly. My work at that time was all did on plywood with rope and tin and house paint and stuff. This artist, John Shelton, he tell me I ought to be using art paint [oil paint] and canvasses. He suggest I ought to draw pictures on paper to show peoples what I can do, and I started that at that time. I decided to draw my first paper pictures about women, ’cause the show the newspaper make fun of was all about women."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial) -
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Clara Passes Away
United States
Dial's wife of 54 years passed away. She helped him with his art throughout the years. Dial recalled, "I had this idea once at Pullman Standard. They had this punching iron with a hydraulic cylinder. They didn’t have anything behind the cylinder to hold it in and keep it from blowing out. It was costing them money. They would lose cylinders and lose production. I had the idea how to correct that problem and save them a lot of money. I had Clara write it out, and I drawed pictures to show how it worked and give all of it to the people down in the office."
(http://soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial)