Thornton Dial: From Bessemer to the Cosmos

Image: Thornton Dial, Lady Loves To Put Places Back Together, 1989. Cloth, Splash Zone, glass marbles, wood, enamel on wood; © Thornton Dial. Courtesy the artist and Tinwood Foundation.

Edel Assanti is pleased to present From Bessemer to the Cosmos, the first UK solo exhibition of large-scale paintings and assemblages by late American artist Thornton Dial (1928–2016), organised in collaboration with MARCH Gallery. Coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of the artist’s death in 2016, the exhibition brings together a selection of major, mostly unseen works produced during a pivotal decade of Dial’s career, from 1988 to 1998.

The works in From Bessemer to the Cosmos narrate the African American experience across the twentieth century and beyond: from sharecropping in the Black Belt and the Great Migration, to the struggles and triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and complexities of identity in a rapidly shifting postmodern America.

Despite inherent obstacles and persistent misunderstandings, over the ten years charted by this exhibition Dial’s work grew in scale, material complexity, and thematic ambition, employing animistic symbols and illuminating titles to convey both autobiographical narratives and broader histories of Black experience.

From Bessemer to the Cosmos encircles a critical period of Dial’s practice where his gaze – previously focused on his immediate community and surroundings – expanded to encompass humanity at large, from his home in Bessemer, Alabama to the edges of the cosmos and the confines of life itself.

Edel Assanti,

London

16 January - 14 March 2026

Free entry

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