Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale.

[2] Thornton Dial was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie Bell, on a former cotton plantation in Emelle, Alabama, where relatives in his extended family worked as sharecroppers.

He is also the founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of African American art.

[7] Over time, the context for Dial's work has expanded to showcase the political and social responsiveness of his artwork, expressing "ideas about black history, slavery, racial discrimination, urban and rural poverty, industrial or environmental collapse, and spiritual salvation".

[13]In still another response to the Hard Truths exhibition, New York Times reporter Carol Kino described Dial's "work's look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew[ing] closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Combining paint and found materials, Dial constructs large-scale assemblages with cast-away objects ranging from rope to bones to buckets.

[16] Works such as Black Walk and The Blood of Hard Times, for example, use corrugated tin and other dilapidated pieces of metal to refer to the destitute bodies and vernacular architecture of the rural South.

Artist and African-American art historian David C. Driskell explained Dial's use of the tiger as an allegory for survival and an implicit reference to the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

In the works made a few years before the artist’s death, Thornton Dial created layered, heavily textured compositions with an array of found materials, such as ash, wire fencing and scrap metal.

"[22] Two of Dial's major works were included in a March 2016 gift to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by the president of its board of trustees, William A. Royall, and his wife, Pam.

[23] Artsy, the online industry publication, gave the Dial show at Marianne, "We All Live Under the Same Old Flag", top billing among 15 "blockbuster", "must-see" gallery exhibitions on display during the month of May.

[25] The show garnered significant press, including a review from the editors of ARTnews, who praised the artist's diverse oeuvre of "early self-portraits as well as paintings treating Jim Crow–era America and the struggle for civil rights, the O.J.