STRUGGLING TIGER PROUD STEPPING

Struggling Tiger Proud Stepping is an extraordinary assemblage by Thornton Dial (1928-2016). A striped tiger and figure of a woman are integrally involved in the richly textural work, whose turbulent surface is held together by a bold, expressive chromatic structure reminiscent of the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock: blue, green, black, white with pops of red and purple loop and swirl through the composition. At once a painterly and sculptural presence, the densely layered work is collaged from a variety of found materials, including carpet, rope, corrugated tin and Splash Zone compound on canvas. This churning materiality is typical of Dial’s practice. A self-taught artist born in rural Alabama, he started making art from repurposed objects in his backyard using the skills he had gained as a metalworker in the Pullman Standard boxcar factory, where he worked for three decades. In the late 1980s, he caught the attention of William Arnett, an Atlanta collector who sought to promote undiscovered Black artists. A blossoming ambition and opportunity followed. Dial’s works have since been acquired by institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., the de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In addition to Pollock, Dial's works can be compared to the plate paintings of Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer’s vast, sculptural history paintings, or the ‘Combines’ of Robert Rauschenberg – a near-contemporary of Dial’s and a fellow Southerner, who may have in fact been inspired by the regional ‘yard-show’ assemblage tradition from which Dial’s work emerged. Dial, however, arrived at his sophisticated, inventive idiom by a path entirely his own. Creating art from the discarded items around him, he made work that was about, from and quite literally composed of his environment. ‘My art is the evidence of my freedom’, he said. ‘When I start any piece of art I can pick up anything I want to pick up. When I get ready for that, I already got my idea for it … It’s just like inventing something. It’s like patterns that you cut out to show you how to make something – a boxcar, or clothes. Everything got a pattern for it. The pattern for a piece of art is in your mind; it’s the idea for it. That’s the pattern’ (T. Dial, quoted in ‘Thornton Dial’, Souls Grown Deep Foundation, https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/thornton-dial).

Struggling Tiger Proud Stepping displays an intelligence, nuance and a Neo-Expressionist force common to Dial’s large-scale constructions, which often confront grand themes such as race relations, war and industry in America. Here, Dial depicts a tiger traversing through a complicated, dense jungle landscape and a woman is tangled below with outstretched arms, her face actively facing upwards toward the tiger. The tiger is a self-reflective figure loosely based on Dial’s own life and the challenges facing Black men in the South. Thomas McEvilley interprets this composition as a commentary on the Black man’s struggle to free himself of his past experiences. As he moves forward, his “net” ensnares people and memories (Thomas McEvilley, “Proud-Stepping Tiger: History as Struggle in the Work of Thornton Dial”, Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger, eds. Harriet Whelchel, Margaret Donovan (New York, 1993), p.156).