“Respect: Thornton Dial and Gee’s Bend” at Russell Bowman Art Advisory

Published in Time Out Chicago, November 23, 2011

Thornton Dial has worked in bricklaying, steelwork and at a cement plant in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama. The 83-year-old artist’s assemblages—held together by industrial sealing compound and wire fencing—draw on his background in industrial manufacturing. What looks like a baseball pitcher in The Man That Can Play Any Game is surrounded by strips of black rubber tire, as well as swirling blocks of bright blue, yellow and red lines.

Dial’s piece hangs across from Mary Lee Bendolph’s quilt Stripes and Housetop Blocks (pictured), and it reflects both the vibrant primary colors and the blocked linear patterns in her work. Bendolph belongs to the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, a group of women who forged their own unique aesthetic in the small towns of Rehoboth and Boykin, Alabama. In this show’s three quilts, they exhibit a sense of color, shape and line on par with artists such as Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian.

Some of Dial’s emotional drawings are on view as well, such as Projects, in which friendly faces and nesting birds cluster under peaked roofs.(The assemblages seem overworked in comparison.) Dial’s work vibrates on the wall, in contrast to the Gee’s Bend quilts’ stoic constructivism.

Dial and the Gee’s Bend Quilters share a champion in collector and curator William Arnett, though the gallery doesn’t highlight Arnett’s attempts to stop them from being pigeonholed as “outsider artists.” He believes they’re part of an aesthetically unified and historically significant art movement: the vernacular visual arts of the African-American South. Bendolph’s incredible color aquatint etching To Honor Mr. Dial (2005) makes clear the artists’ connection is not just aesthetic.

- CW