HALL, DILMUS
(1900–1987)
was an artist, born in Oconee County, Georgia, into a large farming family headed by a blacksmith father. When his regimen of farm work permitted, he attended arural schoolhouse and occasionally made small figural sculptures. Around 1913 he moved with his family to Athens, Georgia, where he repeated the eighth grade.During World War II he went to Europe and served as a stretcher-bearer with the United States Army Medical Corps. After the war, Hall worked in Athens at variousservice and manual-labor jobs until he retired in 1961. He and his wife of many years, Zaydie, had no children, and she died in 1973.During the 1950s Hall embellished his small concrete-block house in West Athens with painted concrete decorations and wall-mounted relief sculptures, while fillingmost of the small front yard with figural sculptures in the same medium, including a central cautionary tableau he called
The Devil and the Drunk Man
.Hall made a number of strikingly reductive, sculptural variations on the theme of the Crucifixion, and the facade of his house was ornamented with hisanthropomorphic sculptural reliefs of the sun and moon. Hall also made many small mixed-media drawings about religious as well as secular themes.
See also
Religious Folk Art; Sculpture, Folk
.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Patterson, Tom. “D.Hall.”
Brown’s Guide to Georgia,
vol. 9, no. 12 (December 1981): 57–58