Charles Clarence Dawson (1889-1981)

Charles Clarence Dawson is significant for his many contributions to illustration, design, and fine art during the “Chicago Black Renaissance” of the interwar period and beyond. The “Great Migration,” which refers to the relocation of large numbers of African Americans from rural areas in the South to urban centers in the North, transformed the first half of the twentieth century and impacted Dawson’s arts leadership and design pursuits. The accompanying principles of the “New Negro Movement” marked a flourishing of black philosophic, economic, creative, and political practices in the midst of the repressive Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow era.

Dawson, born in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1889, attended the renowned Tuskegee Institute, a school initially opened for African American teachers led by celebrated educator and orator Booker T. Washington. While there, Dawson studied drafting with architect Walter Thomas Bailey, who was appointed head of the Mechanical Industries Department in 1905 and would later design several of the school’s buildings, including the still-used women’s dormitory, White Hall, as well as significant buildings in Chicago and Memphis. Soon afterwards, in 1907, Dawson relocated to New York to attend the Art Students League as its first black pupil. In 1912, Dawson moved to Chicago, to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. According to his unpublished autobiography, Touching the Fringes of Greatness, Dawson attributes his attendance to the Art Institute’s progressive stance on race, insofar as “the policy of the Art Institute was entirely free of bias.” An active student, Dawson was secretary of the Chicago Architectural League, manager of the Annual Chicago Architectural Exhibition, and member of the Art Students League of Chicago. Upon graduation and at the outset of World War I, in 1917, Dawson joined the segregated armed forces as an officer in training with the Buffalo Soldiers regiment and was sent to France. 

Dawson’s return to Chicago was framed by the racial conflict between black communities of the South Side and white populations who struggled over jobs and city territory. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 testifies powerfully to these tensions. At the same time, Chicago’s black population was undergoing newfound power associated with the thriving community of Bronzeville, Chicago’s epicenter of black social life since the early twentieth century. As a freelance illustrator and arts leader Dawson worked with other black artists, such as graphic designer and artist William Farrow, in the organizing of the Chicago Art League (1924), a black artists collective that “offered classes and exhibition opportunities for local artists” and held exhibitions “at the YMCA on Wabash Avenue in Bronzeville.”

One of Dawson’s significant accomplishments came in 1927 with the Negro in Art Week exhibition. Dawson contributed as one of three members of the Committee on Fine and Applied Arts, as the designer of the catalog cover, and as a participating artist. The two-part exhibition, initiated by historian Alain Locke with the Chicago Woman’s Club took place from November 18 through 23 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Woman’s Clubhouse, both situated downtown. It was organized “with the intention of decreasing friction existing between white and colored people by placing before the public an exhibition of the best work produced by Negroes in Fine and Applied Arts, Music, and Literature, in combination with an exhibition of primitive African Art.” The primitive collection referred to is the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of African Arts from the Belgian Congo, which was included to support the thesis that such unique African heritage made African American art a rival of European art. Dawson conceptualized and illustrated the catalog cover, which not only featured pertinent information regarding the exhibition’s location, time, and duration, but showcased foundational ideals central to the “New Negro,” a term popularized by Locke in his book of the same title that boldly proclaimed the black person as sophisticated and full of self-worth. In Dawson’s illustration an Egyptian pharaoh towers over the silhouettes of various musical performers in tuxedoes linking ancient African motifs to black American culture. In the corner of the composition a Songye power figure invokes the transnational work of forging a new black identity by celebrating an African past. In addition to creating the catalog cover, Dawson contributed several paintings to the exhibition. 

In 1927 and 1929 Dawson contributed, both general illustrations and the cover illustration, to the Intercollegian Wonder Book and The Book of Achievement the World Over—The Negro in Chicago 1779–1929. The Wonder Books were encyclopedic volumes celebrating the achievements of the black community in Chicago. The series, directed by Frederic H. Hammurabi Robb, the president of the Washington Intercollegiate Club of Chicago at the time, compiled a substantial account of important black leaders, fraternal organizations, churches, schools, and businesses. In the tradition of this type of work, Dawson also self-designed and self-published the children’s book ABC’s of Great Negros (1933). While visiting the George Cleveland Hall Library in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, Dawson noticed there were no learning materials for black children. The book features twenty-six illustrated biographies of important African American figures, including, Neferti, Frederick Douglas, George Washington Carver, Toussaint l’Ouverture, Zaudita empress of Ethiopia, and Mary L. Bethune, among many others.

As the Great Depression gripped the U.S. from the 1930s onward, Dawson maintained a livelihood as one of two black in-house illustrators and designers for Valmor Products Company. Valmor, a Chicago-based cosmetic, beauty supply, and novelties enterprise owned by a white chemist and entrepreneur, produced and marketed a variety of goods to growing black consumer groups. While the pomades and creams coincided with white standards of beauty, including bleaching ointments and hair-straightening tonics, Dawson’s rendering of urbane black sophisticates in minimalist lines and bold shapes had a deep impact on generations of modernist illustrators, artists, and designers of all creeds. A recent exhibition organized in 2015 at the Chicago Cultural Center not only gathered and presented much of Dawson’s work for Valmor, including product labels and advertisement designs, it also assigned authorship to the work which had originally circulated in anonymity. Moreover, the exhibition highlighted the importance of Dawson’s influence beyond the black community, as exampled by the testimony of celebrated contemporary graphic novelist Chris Ware.

At the same time, Dawson completed illustrated advertisements for Poro College, an important social hub and educational complex founded by Annie Malone in St. Louis. The school was dedicated to the economic and communal uplift of “Race Women,” a term describing black advocates who sought to improve their conditions and the conditions of other black women through social intervention and education. While Poro College offered deportment, cosmetology, and sales training, it also met the spatial and social needs of a broad and burgeoning black cultural movement, a role far exceeding the general understanding of a beauty school. Among the advertisements Dawson devised, an important series of image and text prints linking modern black people to ancient history and myth stands out. The folio, titled “Famous Black Beauties of History and Mythology,” displays deft illustration skills merged with an interest in redefining blackness as beautiful and important to history.

In 1933, amongst much debate regarding the lack of inclusion of black people, Dawson received a commission sponsored by the Urban League to paint a mural within the Social Science Hall for the Century of Progress International Exposition. Also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, the expansive exposition took place on the one-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of Chicago. Dawson’s mural, titled Negro Migration: The Exodus, depicted the Great Migration from rural South to the industrialized North. On each side of the main image were panels filled with “statistics to highlight the social issues of health, housing, and employment and the role of the Urban League in addressing those issues on a national scale.” And while there were “Negro” attractions at the Fair, mostly organized by non-black concessioners, stereotypes were commonplace tools used to pique public interest. The exposition was widely understood by the black community to be “a white man’s proposition.” For the second year of the fair, in 1934, Dawson was commissioned to illustrate and design the poster for a pageant of black music, “O, Sing A New Song,” which highlighted the achievements of African American culture. The poster showcases Dawson’s interest in combining multiple eras. Ancient Egyptian images are mingled with African dancers and drummers, while enslaved folks sing in the fields. At the center of the image is a modern black woman in a 1930s evening gown, her face lifted high. At the bottom of the poster similar women engage in a choreographed dance routine. 

In the following years, Dawson would participate in another exposition, this one challenging the general racism of the Century of Progress Chicago World’s Fair. The American Negro Exposition, held at the Chicago Coliseum from July 4 through September 2, 1940, gave Dawson a chance to expand his cultural uplifting work into three dimensional dioramas. The exposition, which took place on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, was considered the first Negro World's Fair as it gave black people a unique opportunity to represent themselves and their contributions to American life since 1865. Dawson conceptualized and designed a set of thirty-three dioramas marketed as a history of black influence on the progress of America and the world. The dioramas celebrated scenes from ancient Egypt and Africa that showcased important technological and social events, such as, African metal smelting, the use of the wheel by Ethiopians, and the building of the Sphinx. Other noteworthy views included a violent panorama of the first slave market in Virginia (1619), various moments from the Reconstruction era, as well as a depiction of the highly decorated Harlem Hellfighters, an African-American regiment that fought in World War I only to endure continued racism and segregation at home. As a veteran of the segregated armed forces, Dawson experienced this treatment first-hand. 

Although some were eventually damaged and even lost entirely, the dioramas were gifted to the Tuskegee Institute after the exposition. Dawson, who was beginning his own career at the school, oversaw the repair and installation of the remaining dioramas in their new home at the Museum of Negro Art and Culture at the George Washington Carver Museum where he served as curator from 1944 to 1951. Dawson eventually retired in New Hope, Pennsylvania and passed away in 1981. His archival papers and documents are currently housed at the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

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https://interactive.wttw.com/art-design-chicago/charles-clarence-dawson.

Bone, Robert and Richard A. Courage. The Muse of Bronzeville: African-American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950. Foreword by Amritjit Singh. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Burkett, Randall K. “Hammurabi in the (MARBL) House.” Emory Libraries & Information Technology. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Blog. May 1, 2015. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/marbl/2015/05/01/hammurabi-in-the-marbl-house/.

Charles C. Dawson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Charles Dawson Papers, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Illinois.

City of Chicago. “Love for Sale: The Graphic Art of Valmor Products.” 2015. http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/Valmor.html.

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Das, Joanna Dee. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017.

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Reynolds, Gary A. Charles Clarence Dawson, 1889–1981. Newark, New Jersey: Newark Museum, 1989.

Schulman, David. “Charles Dawson.” AIGA: The Professional Association for Design, September 1, 2008. http://www.aiga.org/design-journeys-charles-dawson/.

Schulman, Daniel. “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis’: African-American Painters in Chicago, 1893–1945.” In Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy. Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004.

The Newberry Library. “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots.” https://publications.newberry.org/chicago1919/.

West, Sandra L. “Dawson, Charles Clarence (1889–1981), Painter.” In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Aberjhani and Sandra L. West, 83. New York: Checkmark Books, 2003.

“William McKnight Farrow.” In Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography, edited by Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 192–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.