Thornton Dial & Jasmine Little

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a dual-artist exhibition of works by Thornton Dial and Colorado-based artist Jasmine Little. The presentation will focus on Dial's works on paper created between 1991 - 2005 and four new stoneware vessels by Little. The exhibition will be on view July 2 through September 13, 2020, at the gallery's space in Aspen, Colorado. Shown together, Dial's works on paper and Little's stoneware vessels will explore their distinct approaches and interest in iconography. The works on view highlight both artists' facility in portraying narrative structures through their chosen medium and create a dialogue around ideas of ownership, reference, narrative, and medium.

 

Thornton Dial was born in Sumter County, Alabama in 1928, with the effects of slavery ever-present and Jim Crow oppression restricting the lives of Black Americans. Throughout his practice, Dial created drawings, monumental sculpture, and assemblages that referenced personal and collective experiences of living as an African American man in the South. The works on paper by Dial on view create narratives through primarily representational imagery and symbols, including female and African American figures, tigers, fish, and birds, formed through swirled lines and exuberant strokes. Together with the insightful titling of the work, Dial mines his personal life and a history of struggle and oppression, forming stories that are at times somber, but also contain joy and wit, illuminating the artist's preoccupation with understanding his place in the world.

 

Jasmine Little's large-scale, cylindrical vessels feature a variety of figures, animals, and plants that the artist inlays into a wet clay form along with pieces of brick, gravel, and porcelain before firing in a gas kiln. Traditionally a painter, Little pulls the source imagery for the ceramics from wide-ranging origins, including 13th-century Gothic ivory carvings, Mannerist painting, and Ancient Egyptian ceramics. Little takes particular interest in weaving together different points of human history, pulling apart art historical references, time, and place and rebuilding them in her stoneware vessels. In the process of recontextualizing the source imagery through ceramics - a medium embedded with a history of craft and labor - the artist democratizes these references and the viewing experience by focusing her attention away from a set narrative and using a more functional form.