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Gift of halley k harrisburg, Class of 1990, and Michael Rosenfeld
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Accession Number
2017.8.4
“Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world,” artist Thornton Dial explained in 1996. “It can lead peoples through the darkness and help them from being afraid of the darkness. Art is a guide for every person who is looking for something.” A child of Alabama sharecroppers, Dial worked as a farmer and created assemblage art in relative obscurity for decades. He only began working on paper around 1990 at the time of his first museum exhibition. In this drawing, Dial uses charcoal and graphite to sketch a nude female figure and then red pastel for her skin and blue for her eyes.
