Thornton Dial’s Peak Behind Your Blinders at Hauser & Wirth

Hauser&Wirth installation detail. Thornton Dial: The Visible and the Invisible; November 2, 2024-January 11, 2025. Pictured; (left) “Monkeys and People Love the Tiger Cat”and (right) “Alone in the Jungle: One Man Sees the Tiger Cat”. Each 1988.

By JOHN DRURY December 1, 2024

From the better-late-than-never files, I guess, it is always revealing to see the NYC “art world” flock to this or that maker, clustered, and in trendy response some late-to-the-plate awakening to utter genius; that available to them for decades prior, but now garnering fashionable rejoinder…group-think. The woke retort to the works of the great Thornton Dial, says more about the gatekeepers of the contemporary art world…its curators, than is comfortable.

Soothsayer William Arnett, who collected to preserve, the lion’s share of this work by Dial, Lonnie Holley, the Gee’s Bend quilters and others grouped into this body of work deemed Southern vernacular, voiced its importance for decades, upon deaf and once at least, seemingly deafening ears. Backpedaling is 20-20, and as galleries and museums rush to procure, what should have been supported many, many years back – we see revealed the clubbish, exclusionary tactics the system of exposure a racist, self-serving, and self-righteous practice that is still prevalent amongst many of the art elite. Let’s wake the fuck up, already – and follow our eyes and hearts to genius, not in group-thought, or follow the (supposed) leader, but in fevered diversity what is yet, a support sickeningly homogenized vision. Ruffle some feathers. The danger of course, this all-or-none mentality, the box-checking practice, is the dilution quality (damaging the whole) as dealers continue to flock, to embrace, categories of makers without discern for ship-shape; a grab what you can get easily mentality.

Thornton Dial (2011) “Mr. Dial’s America”; Wall clock, miniature sailboat, fabric, clothing, bedding, books, wood, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood, 74 x 97 x 9.25 inches. Courtesy Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Kudos then to the Hauser & Wirth, who do their homework in avoidance, in error (exposing), works by half-baked makers. Here is the thoughtful example, a mining, a gold-rich vein of exposed possibility too long overlooked. And it comes at the perfect time, in the face of a newly elected misogynist, racist bigot. The juxtaposition is riveting. The timing today, could not have been better. In Thornton Dial’s works, we are allowed the opulent personal perspective, an uncomfortable, shared past. Thornton Dial’s is not the banal decorative, nor simple replacement of one people for another (the new exclusionary; tit for tat), but a given historical circumstance, the dire responsibility each, and us all. And here we are, at the doorstep a return to inequity, as a matter of newly formulated policy. One step back.

Dial’s powerful work needs to be evaluated, and recognized, some of the very most important of the 20^th century. You may arrive fashionably late, perhaps, but I welcome you to the party, nonetheless. Where the heck ya’ been? WM