Thornton Dial, Sr. was born in 1928 in the tiny rural community of Emelle, Ala. Raised by his great-grandmother, Dial went to work on the farm as a small child, harvesting corn and sweet potatoes. After the death of his great-grandmother, Dial and his younger half-brother went to live with a relative in the small industrial town of Bessemer, Ala. While growing up in Bessemer, Dial held many odd jobs — including raising cattle, hauling ice, and masonry and carpentry work — until he was employed as a metalworker at the Bessemer Pullman-Standard boxcar factory, where he worked intermittently until its closure in 1981.

Throughout his life experiences as a husband, father of five children, neighbor and paternal figure to his entire family, Dial was quietly observing and honing his artistic skills. In 1993, his first solo museum exhibition, Image of the Tiger was jointly presented by the American Folk Art Museum and the New Museum in New York City.

In 2000, Dial's work was featured in the Whitney Museum Biennial and was also the subject of major solo exhibitions in 2005 and 2011. Today, Dial's work can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, de Young Museum in San Francisco, Atlanta's High Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Whitney Museum of American Art.

In Dial's home state of Alabama, his works are in the collections of UAB's Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham Museum of Art, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Paul R. Jones Museum of American Art.

When Dial died in January 2016 at age 87, he left behind a body of work that has transformed American art. Despite no formal training, he took the art world by storm with his ingenious fusion of sculpture and painting, leading an art critic to proclaim that his work marked the end of the "outsider" art movement.

I, Too, Am Alabama is the first comprehensive survey of Dial's entire career, presented by AEIVA in partnership with Samford University and the Wiregrass Museum of Art.