David Lewis on Mounting a Thornton Dial Exhibition at Hauser & Wirth

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

Next month, Hauser & Wirth will mount an exhibition dedicated to Thornton Dial, one of the late 20th-century’s most important artists. Dial created works in a variety of modes of allegorical paintings to massive assemblages. At its 542 West 22nd Street space in Chelsea, Hauser & Wirth will show eight large-scale works by Dial, ranging from 1988 to 2011.

The exhibition is organized by David Lewis, who recently joined Hauser & Wirth as senior director after running a taste-making Lower East Side gallery for more than a decade. Titled “The Visible and Invisible,” the exhibition, which opens November 2, looks at how Dial’s art is on its surface a visual and aesthetic feast. Below the surface, these works tackle some of the most important issues in the contemporary art world, namely who get canonized and who doesn’t. Lewis first began working with Dial’s estate in 2018, two years after the artist’s passing at age 87, and part of his work has been to reorient the perception of Dial as a self-taught or “outsider” artist into someone who transcends those limiting labels.

To learn more about Dial’s art and the upcoming exhibition, ARTnews spoke to Lewis by phone.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: How did you first come to know Thornton Dial’s work?

David Lewis: I was made aware of Thornton Dial’s work right around the time that I opened my now former gallery, just over 10 years ago. I immediately was drawn to the work. Being a tiny, emerging gallery on the Lower East Side, it didn’t really seem plausible or realistic to take him on in any way. But as the gallery grew, I started to work with more some more established artists, like Barbara Bloom or Mary Beth Edelson, who, I had a previous relationship with, and then with estates. Edelson was still alive at the time, but she was no longer making work, so it was a historical project. I started to broaden out from emerging artists of my generation to artists of the Pictures Generation, artists with historical pedigrees and exhibition histories. Around 2017, with these kinds of artists in place and drawing upon my training as an art historian, Dial seemed plausible and deeply exciting. The first show we did was in early 2018. Dial died in 2016, and I never met him.

I’m sure there was a wealth of material that could have factored in that first show and you could have made several dozen shows, if not more.

That’s still the case, by the way.

How did decide on the focus for that 2018 show?

The way I was thinking about it then is very analogous, in a way, to the way I’m approaching the upcoming show in November. I was always very aware of Dial as a contemporary artist. With my own background, in European modernism—I wrote a PhD on [Francis] Picabia from a very theorized standpoint of the avant-garde and problems of his historiography and interpretation in 20th century modernism. So, my attraction to Dial was not only about his achievement [as an artist], which is magnificent and endlessly meaningful, with such immense symbolic and material possibilities, but there was always another level of the challenge and the thrill of where does this belong? Can it now belong, as it briefly did in the ’90s, to the most advanced, the newest, the most emerging, as it were, story of what contemporary or American postwar art is about? That’s always been how I came to Dial, how I relate to the history, and how I make exhibition choices on a strategic level or an intuitive level.

I was very attracted to works which showed Dial’s greatness as a thinker. He made a great work called Two Coats (2003) in response to seeing a Joseph Beuys’s Felt Suit (1970) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That work shows how deeply committed Dial was, to what we would essentially call to institutional critique. The work is posed as a question: Why does this man’s coat—Joseph Beuys’s—get to be in a museum? What Dial does is present two coats, one above the another, which is turned upside down. He essentially uses the painting as a meditation of inclusion and exclusion. In order for one thing to be in, something else must be out. In order for something to be high, something else must be low. He also whitewashed a great majority of the painting. The original painting is an orange-y color, adding an additional meditation on the specific nature of inclusion and exclusion of art historical canonization from his perspective as a Southern Black man and the problem of whiteness and its history. I was eager to show works like that, showing him not just as an incredible visual talent and an incredible maker of things, but an incredible thinker about the very questions of how do we tell this story and why.

Would you say that was a central concern of his practice, these dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, high and low?

If you look at the “Tiger “phase of Dial’s career, which begins in the late ’80s and culminates in the most important Dial institutional exhibition—“Image of the Tiger,” at New Museum in 1993— that’s a very crucial moment. The “Tiger” series, on the one hand, is Dial’s image of himself as an artist, as a creator, as a hero. It’s then an image of the African American artist as a performer. He often paints the audience [in these works]. We have two “Tiger” works in the upcoming show, Alone in the Jungle: One Man Sees the Tiger Cat (1988) and Monkeys and People Love the Tiger Cat (1988). Both of those works are not simple celebrations—however sumptuous or energetic—of Dial as tiger. They’re already meditations on the relationship between artist and audience, and on another level, on the relationship between Black artists and white audience, or privileged audience and labor. This is a theme, a kind of reflexivity about this system, the art world, that is in it right from the start.

I like to think of the “Tigers” in relationship to [Ralph] Ellison’s Invisible Man and the great tradition of artist images that come out of there, the “Tiger” as a hyper-visible version of the Invisible Man problem set, as it were. There’s very little Dial that is not abstracting and reflecting on one issue after another. They are endlessly deep and reverberating in that way—I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time with the work.

Is the upcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth a survey of Dial’s career?

I think of it as a survey. It starts with the “Tigers” from the late ’80s, going through the middle period of assemblages and history painting where Dial takes on this mantle as the kind of painter of modern life, because he’s responding very directly, and not only allegorically, to what is on the news, from the OJ Simpson trial to 9/11 and the Iraq War. (He came up to New York to see the site of Ground Zero.) We’re also including a really pivotal work toward the end of this high-middle period, called Mr. Dial’s America (2011), which is his response to seeing news footage of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. We’re also including work from the last period, which goes until 2016. In a way, that work is the least well-known because there are no museum shows in those last years. That’s not for any particular reason, but it just so happens that all the catalogs end around 2011. Those are works that start to become very ecological, poetic, lyrical. They’re addressing nature and natural disasters. There’s an incredible late work, Nuclear Condition (2011), that is suggested by [the news of] the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. Floods are a very important motif for Dial throughout, as an image of the destruction of an unjust world and the possibility of justice and redemption. We’re choosing major works from all periods to show Dial’s achievement.

You recently joined Hauser & Wirth as senior director. Why did you decide that the Dial show would be your debut with the gallery, especially since the gallery doesn’t currently represent the estate?  

This show at Hauser & Wirth is an opportunity for the case for Dial to be made in a way that hasn’t before. In so many ways, it’s the best possible gallery to make this argument. There’s no gallery that has been as broadly committed to a sort of progressive revision of art history at a strategic level as Hauser & Wirth has. There’s a shared macro set of values here. There are so many connections to artists in the program, beginning most obviously with Jack Whitten. Most people don’t know that Jack Whitten and Thornton Dial are from the same town, Bessemer, Alabama. There’s a 2009 Smithsonian interview where Jack Whitten talks about how every time he goes home, he visits the great Thornton Dial. How is that completely invisible to the contemporary art world, to our understanding of art history?

Has your engagement with Dial’s work changed or evolved over the last several years of working with the estate?

I would say two things. One is, I wouldn’t say that much has changed so as much as it’s only intensified. I’ve only come to believe much more strongly in Dial as a late modernist, deeply reflective master of symbolic narrative. The sense of that has only deepened the more time I spend with each work or the more aware I am of how much each work has to say on many levels. It’s energized me over and over again. In a way, that instinct was always there—it’s just been validated deeply. The flip side of that is the sense of astonishment at how the history that has been written about Dial does not reflect his actual achievement, and essentially, not only limits it but imagines things that don’t actually fit. The categories that he’s been placed in and limited by are not in any way accurate. They’re wildly not the case for his art.

When you say categories, do you mean labels like “outsider” artist?

Outsider, folk, or self-taught. These are fascinating to me because art historical categorization is something that I worked on academically. In the early ’90s, [critic] Donald Kuspit writes about Dial, [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, and [Howard] Finster, these three as a kind of an emblem for the moment. Basquiat and Dial as self-taught artists! Thirty-something years ago, that was a comparison you could make in the contemporary art world. That seems quite far-fetched now. It’s astonishing to me how flimsy these social constructions are. It’s exciting to challenge and change them.