Back when I was living in Fort Pierce, Florida, at the last minute I was included in the exhibition
Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic (ISBN: 0807843016) 
by Lowry S. Sims. Amongst the number of fantastic artists included in the exhibition was Thornton Dial. We still have a ways to go before everyone from that exhibition is fully recognized for their artistic and cultural contributions.
Art: Letting His Life’s Work Do the Talking:
“The work of Thornton Dial will be on exhibit at his first career retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat. ‘If anybody else had created a major opus of this scope,’ said Joanne Cubbs, an adjunct curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “he or she would be recognized as a major force in the art world. Instead Dial struggles at the margins.”
But his marginalization may not last much longer. Mr. Dial’s first career retrospective, ‘ Hard Truth,’ opens at the museum in Indianapolis on Friday. And on March 19 the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Chelsea will open Mr. Dial’s first solo gallery show in New York in 11 years. ‘This feels like the moment when the cultural world is ready to understand Mr. Dial and perhaps to embrace him,’ said Ms. Cubbs, who organized the museum survey. “
(Via NYT > Arts.)