Cubbs also associated the quilts in Dial’s work with the financial and practical hardships that lead to repurposing pieces of clothing. The exhibition catalog, Creation Story: Gee’s Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial, specifically investigated the relationship between Dial and the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend. In Cubbs’s contributing essay, “The Poetry of Castaway Things”, she states that Dial and the Gee’s Bend quilters bonded through their shared artistic practice of recycling pieces of clothing and the history of living in impoverished areas of Alabama. For example, Cubbs explains in her essay that “like the women of that community, he uses old, leftover objects to create his art, not only because of their ready availability but because of their expressive potency.”[102] The painted wall assemblage is thus a specific reference to the contribution of Southern women that quilted and contributed to other domestic roles.

Dial’s interaction with the quilters was not only about using found objects and creative expression, but it was also about the manual labor invested in creating quilts. Cubbs asserts that the artists’ shared hardships produced expressive quilts with vibrant patterns and varied shapes.[103] Art historian Anna C. Chave also explains, “Gee’s Bend quiltmakers generally emphasize that the arduous, perennial labor of assembling their families’ covers and was done out of an abject need on top of the backbreaking labor of farming and running households.”[104] While hardships played a vital role in both artists’ works, there are additional components that push beyond the aesthetic and practical financial purposes of using found textiles. The quilters of Gee’s Bend and Dial still remained dedicated to their practice of using found textiles even when they had the financial security to buy newer fabrics. Such an aesthetic choice between Dial and the quilters of Gee’s Bend indicates the more incredible message of what using found objects has. Using found old, worn fabrics is what many Gee’s Bend quilters were used to sewing, and it reveals their autobiographical significance.

The quilts of History Refused to Die also speak to the close relationship between Dial and Bendolph. In the book Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond, Bendolph recounted her story of learning how to piece strips of clothing together which is similar to Dial’s assemblage style. A needle and thread were provided and given to Bendolph by her mother so that she could begin to quilt. Bendolph would sew each piece of old clothing until they achieved the likeness that she wanted and would only sew with used clothing to reduce wastefulness and maintain the life of the person who wore them.[105] According to the National Endowment for the Arts, Bendolph’s mother did not allow her to use a sewing machine, forcing her to make each stitch by hand. Her mother’s decision forced Bendolph to take her time while quilting and, in that process, she learned how therapeutic it was (Fig. 20).[106]

Both Dial and Bendolph bonded on this aspect of domestic labor that was born from financial struggle. Women and labor left a positive impact on the his life. He viewed women as the “creation of the world”, which was a reference to their nurturing and labored efforts.[107] Quilting was primarily done by women in the Gee’s Bend, and it was essentially a female-dominated line of work, yet Dial joined his own stylistic method with the quilters. In History Refused to Die, gender binaries become unified throughout the work, ultimately giving credit to both women and men workers for their shared spaces of labor (Fig. 21). History Refused to Die shows that women were an integral part of Dial’s life and oeuvre. Dial had grown up mainly in the care of women and greatly admired their contributions as domestic laborers. He has explained, “Women back then was picking cotton, doing hard time fieldwork, cooking, making, and providing. All the children back then had to respect grown ladies.”[108] One of his painted works titled Mrs. Bendolph (2002) (Fig. 22) credits Bendolph and the larger community of Gee’s Bend quilters.[109] Based on the work’s surface appearance, Dial suggestively took an interest in the geometric formations that are one of the defining characteristics of a Gee’s Bend quilt.