Experience nine significant works on paper by the most famous American Southern Vernacular artist, Thornton Dial, Sr., on view in the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum’s Bates Permanent Collection Gallery (opening 2/22/18, 6pm; continuing 2/23/18 through year end during regular gallery hours). These nine works are part of the Gadsden Arts Permanent Collection, seven of which were new acquisitions in 2017.

While Dial’s large-scale assemblages and sculptures have gained much attention, his drawings and paintings on paper have a particularly unifying style and concentration of subject matter. Most of these works feature women, often with an animal, like a tiger, fish, or bird, and speak to the relationships between men and women. His drawings are lyrical with female forms floating in space, twisting around tigers, executed in bold out-of-the-tube watercolors, or in soft charcoal and pencil lines. In his 2011 book exclusively about Dial’s works on paper, Bernard L. Herman writes that the first quality a viewer perceives when encountering Dial’s drawings, “is movement at once balletic and ballistic, where dance and power coalesce.” View these works by Thornton Dial, Sr. at the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum through the end of the year.