LCV Spring 2013 - (Page 87)

Keeping the Pigs from Rooting, 1988 by Thornton Dial (Alabama) Paint, carpet, wood, epoxy, metal New Orleans Museum of Art (2011.66) Gift of Dr. Kurt Gitter into the museum’s galleries. In 1993, NOMA published the catalog Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present, originated and circulated the related award-winning exhibition to museums throughout the country and hosted a major symposium on the subject which brought together more than 300 curators, collectors and dealers. Most recently, in the spring of 2012, the Museum presented the nationally respected exhibition Hard Truths: The Art of Thorton Dial. This sampling of works from the museum’s permanent collection features twelve nationally recognized self-taught southern artists born from the turn of the twentieth century to the World War II era. This rare early work of Thornton Dial (b. 1928) shows the artist’s pictorial foundation: his early interest in multi-dimensional works, the inventive use of materials at hand, and the layering of both materials and meaning. In this figurative work, the female form and pig are made of the painted underside of a rug, while the pig’s head protrudes sculpturally from the painted surface of irregular-shaped wood. A yellow-painted metal object, an invention of Dial’s, is positioned in the hand of the woman and also seen in situ on the pig’s face in white paint. This device is meant to keep the animal from gathering his own food and therefore from wandering away from home. When it swings forward, the center rod reaches the ground, but the pig’s snout cannot reach it— keeping him dependent on his own trough. In the context of Dial’s symbolic world, this might suggest similarities to the concerns of women keeping their men close to the hearth. A study of these works introduces the reader to indigenous characteristics of American self-taught artists, and provides visual testimony to the artists’ environment and life experience in the American South. Self-taught artists have minimal formal education and no art education. They often began making art as a result of a dramatic life change, such as retirement (Sam Doyle), divine inspiration (Sister Gertrude Morgan and Howard Finster) or a debilitating accident (Charlie Lucas). Without knowledge of the works of other artists, these individuals were sometimes referred to as folk or “outsider” artists. They lived, however, as insiders, deeply rooted in continues on page 90 Spring 2013 • LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 87 

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LCV Spring 2013

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