Self-Taught Artist Thornton Dial

High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man), 2002
Dial even manages to inject new life into one of the most cliched images of postwar America. In this complex assemblange, a stuffed Mickey Mouse doll, the white portions of its face smeared in black, hangs in chains in the midst of a wire-and-rod construction meant to signify a slave ship with goat-hide sails. With one compact gesture, Dial invokes the atrocity of the Atlantic slave trade and the minstrel-show culture the descendants of those slaves adopted to entertain and outwit their oppressors. It would all be funny if the laughs didn't come so hard.

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