Heidi Lee-Komaromi is also a USPAP qualified appraiser and certified member of the Appraisers Association of America. She was tasked to appraise an entire collection of Outsider Art owned by one of the first collectors of Outsider Art by artists from the American South. The collection consisted of hundreds of works of art by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Purvis Young, and many others. Heidi and her team successfully researched, inspected, catalogued, photographed, and appraised each work of art for the client. Research included trips to Georgia and Indiana.
ABOUT THORNTON DIAL
Dial is widely recognized as one of the most important American artists, having transitioned from creating in obscurity to having his work collected by major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is considered a “pioneering, self-taught African American artist” whose work is now in the permanent collections of The Met, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Dial is often described as a crucial figure who bridged the world of “outsider” or “self-taught” art with the mainstream contemporary art world.
“One of the most revered contemporary self-taught artists, Dial integrated into his work mass-produced objects and organic materials, all infused with rich symbolic resonances. His impressive History Refused to Die incorporates torn and stained clothing, wire, and other common materials as well as okra stalks and roots. The plant serves as a metaphor for the shared history—the “roots”—of people whose personal genealogies tie back to Africa. Widely associated with Southern cuisine, okra is indigenous to Africa and, like many other foodstuffs, came to the Americas via the international slave trade. Its presence in Dial’s sculpture evokes the ecological transplantation that paralleled the forced displacement and enslavement of millions of Africans throughout the New World.” – Metropolitan Museum of Art