A line strung with dead birds runs across an overcast sky of blue-grey enamel. The image appears familiar: crows used as scarecrows, the dead displayed to warn off the living. But these birds turn out to be scraps of black cloth suspended from real wire against the canvas, each with curiously human overtones. A glove, a hat, the actual traces of people – beyond the allusions to Jim Crow laws and southern lynchings the tragic poetry is irreducible. These flightless birds have neither life nor freedom.
Thornton Dial was 80 when he made this masterpiece in 2008. Born on a former cotton plantation in Alabama, he left school at 10 to support his family, working for decades in a railroad car plant. His struggle to find time, money or materials outside the established systems and institutions is emblematic of all 34 Black artists from the American south in this show. Theirs is a hardwon art of direct speech and passionate vision, of love, witness and historic record conjured out of wood, tin and cloth, car paint and clay, even the dirt of the earth.
