Thorton Dial made energetic, colorful sculptures and relief paintings using found and commercial materials, both natural and industrial. Dial was born in 1928 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. Escaping a life of sharecropping, he moved to Bessemer, Alabama, to work at the Pullman Company train car factory. When he was laid off in 1981, he turned to making furniture and art.

Dial was inspired by the art he grew up with. This included quilts and the homemade sculptures and signs he saw dotting yards and porches. For a few years, he created in secret, limited by his status as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Starting in 1987, the patronage of collector William Arnett allowed Dial to expand his practice.

The National Gallery has a significant collection of Dial's works, having acquired forty works by various artists from the Arnett collection via the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.