Sitting and Waiting - the Man Needs199360 × 48 × 7 1/2"Enamel, oil, spray paint, found metal, and wood on canvas on woodGift of Ron and June Shelp2013.5.101551134545Thornton Dial Sr.PaintingsCopyright for this work is under review. United StatesAlabamaThree Dimensional WorkseMuseum - Collection HighlightsPaintingsObject information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.
To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org
Political and cultural events of early-1990s prompted widespread popular conversation on the subject of Black masculinity. Controversy surrounding Marion S. Barry and Clarence Thomas in 1990 and 1991, followed by the resounding firestorms over incidents involving Rodney King and O.J. Simpson in 1992 and 1993, forced the nation to examine the ways Black identity—Black masculinity in particular—is constructed in American culture. Sitting and Waiting—the Man Needs represents Thornton Dial Sr.’s meditation on these issues. From his home and studio in Bessemer, Alabama, Dial was celebrated for creating powerful, monumental works of art that drew from the artist’s personal experience as well as more widespread social and political issues related to the Black experience. Comprised of found metal and wood coated in a thick impasto, this striking monochromatic composition expresses a sense of resolute power standing firm within material upheaval. Conspicuously, a cage-like structure has been rendered to the right of the central figure’s head. Does the waiting refer to incarceration specifically, or the legacy of segregation that continues to play out in this country?
In her 1994 catalog for the exhibition Black Male at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curator Thelma Golden wrote that, "the media fascination around Black masculinity is always concentrated in three areas: sex, crime, and sports." Dial’s re-writes this narrative, producing artworks that express a vision of Blackness rooted in family and community, self-sufficiency, working with one’s hands, and living a creative life.
Dial was born in Emelle, Alabama, a rural area near the Mississippi border. He left school at age 9 and moved with his brother Arthur to Bessemer, Alabama to live with his great aunt Sarah Dial Lockett and help out on the family farm. Throughout his teen years he worked at an ice house and a brickyard, and as an adult he held jobs as a carpenter, a highway laborer, a housepainter, a pipe fitter, and an ironworker at the Pullman Standard boxcar factory, where he worked from 1952 until 1980. In 1951 he married his childhood neighbor, Clara Mae Murrow; the two have three sons and two daughters. In 1987, Dial began to create art full time. His big break into the mainstream art world came in 1993 when he was shown in two simultaneous solo shows in New York: one at the Museum of American Folk Art, (now American Folk Art Museum), and the other at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.19931993 2013 5 1 Object information is a work in progress and may be updated with new research. Records are reviewed and revised, and the American Folk Art Museum welcomes additional information.
To help improve this record, please email photoservices@folkartmuseum.org
Political and cultural events of early-1990s prompted widespread popular conversation on the subject of Black masculinity. Controversy surrounding Marion S. Barry and Clarence Thomas in 1990 and 1991, followed by the resounding firestorms over incidents involving Rodney King and O.J. Simpson in 1992 and 1993, forced the nation to examine the ways Black identity—Black masculinity in particular—is constructed in American culture. Sitting and Waiting—the Man Needs represents Thornton Dial Sr.’s meditation on these issues. From his home and studio in Bessemer, Alabama, Dial was celebrated for creating powerful, monumental works of art that drew from the artist’s personal experience as well as more widespread social and political issues related to the Black experience. Comprised of found metal and wood coated in a thick impasto, this striking monochromatic composition expresses a sense of resolute power standing firm within material upheaval. Conspicuously, a cage-like structure has been rendered to the right of the central figure’s head. Does the waiting refer to incarceration specifically, or the legacy of segregation that continues to play out in this country?
In her 1994 catalog for the exhibition Black Male at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curator Thelma Golden wrote that, "the media fascination around Black masculinity is always concentrated in three areas: sex, crime, and sports." Dial’s re-writes this narrative, producing artworks that express a vision of Blackness rooted in family and community, self-sufficiency, working with one’s hands, and living a creative life.
Dial was born in Emelle, Alabama, a rural area near the Mississippi border. He left school at age 9 and moved with his brother Arthur to Bessemer, Alabama to live with his great aunt Sarah Dial Lockett and help out on the family farm. Throughout his teen years he worked at an ice house and a brickyard, and as an adult he held jobs as a carpenter, a highway laborer, a housepainter, a pipe fitter, and an ironworker at the Pullman Standard boxcar factory, where he worked from 1952 until 1980. In 1951 he married his childhood neighbor, Clara Mae Murrow; the two have three sons and two daughters. In 1987, Dial began to create art full time. His big break into the mainstream art world came in 1993 when he was shown in two simultaneous solo shows in New York: one at the Museum of American Folk Art, (now American Folk Art Museum), and the other at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.