Who-Ha Blog

photo by Rob Poss

Russell Blackmon and Pamela Turner have reworked Russell’s script about Howard Finster into a play that will be featured March 8-25, 2012 at Seven Stages in Atlanta. For more, click here.

Opening Reception, Friday, July 8, 6-9PM Click here for more

From childhood on, Dial built “things” using whatever he could salvage, recycling even his own work to reuse materials in new creations. Dial referred to what he made only as “things,” though late in life he found out that others call them “art.” Having developed during the era of racial segregation, Dial’s style is both personal and culturally rich, and it speaks with a resolute voice that was denied him through the years as a black factory worker. In Dial’s art, intense surfaces, multilayered narratives, shifting compositional relationships and a metaphysical concern with issues of recycling and ancestry exist hand in hand with an ironic, earthy wit and an almost religious determination to make art’s complexities and mysteries central to the human understanding of reality. Dial works from within southern African American vernacular traditions, the same cultural impulse that gave birth to blues, jazz, and rock n’ roll. From these roots has emerged an epic, twenty-first-century art whose sophistication and ambition confound all aesthetic categories. Dial’s art transcends labels and bankrupts dichotomies between “fine” and “folk,” “inside” and “outside,” “high” art and “low.”