UNTITLED

A significant theme in Thornton Dial’s oeuvre, the tiger is a self-reflective figure loosely based on Dial’s own life and the challenges facing Black men in the South. The present work is set in the dense jungle, a motif Dial used to represent life before he emerged in the world of the white man. The immediacy of the brushwork forms an energetic composition. As one tiger remains camouflaged into the background, another boasts a more colorful coat and entwines itself with a woman. This engagement between the tiger and the woman is not uncommon in Dial’s works and it holds various meanings. On one hand, women can be seen as divine rewards for the struggling tiger. Alternatively, Dial’s women can refer to another group of outsiders struggling for rights, highlighting the shared challenges between these figures.

A self-taught artist born in rural Alabama, Thornton Dial 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.