Keck & Keck George Fred Keck (1895–1980) and William Keck (1908–1995)
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The architectural firm of Keck & Keck, established by brothers George Fred and William, was one of the most innovative architectural firms in Chicago best known for buildings such as the House of Tomorrow for the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 and modernist residential designs. George Fred Keck, spent one year at the University of Wisconsin studying civil engineering before he moved to Illinois to study architectural engineering at the University of Illinois. Keck began his career teaching at his alma mater and working for various Chicago architecture firms including William Pruyn, where he participated in residential work; D.H. Burnham, where he worked as a draftsman; and John Eberson, where he worked on the Avalon Theater.
At Schmidt, Garden and Martin, George Fred Keck met R. Vale Faro (1902–1988), an avid promoter of modernist design. According to William Keck, his brother’s collaboration with Faro shaped George Fred’s turn toward more radically modernist designs in the late 1920s. Opened in 1929, George Fred Keck designed the Miralago Ballroom and Shops in Wilmette, Illinois. The Miralago Ballroom was known as one of the first modernist retail structures in the Chicago area.
After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1931, George Fred Keck’s younger brother William joined him as an architect, draftsman, and businessman of the company. The Kecks designed the glass and steel House of Tomorrow for the Century of Progress Exhibition (1933–1934) and the Crystal House the following year. Both of these structures gained the Keck brothers nationwide attention as frontrunners in modernist American design. Beyond such popular architectural constructions, the office of Keck & Keck predominately designed innovative residences in Hyde Park, Chicago-area suburbs, and the greater Midwest. The Keck brothers worked with many Chicago-based designers and architects, including interior designer Marianne Willisch and architects Leland Atwood and Paul Schweikher.
The office of Keck & Keck pioneered passive solar house techniques. Their collaborative studies of the seasonal sunlight patterns with scientists at the Adler Planetarium was fundamental to their development of solar houses. During the interwar period, Keck & Keck designed several solar houses in the Midwest, such as the Sloan House and the Kellett House (both in 1939). In 1951, they applied their solar housing research to the Chicago Housing Authority Project Number Nine, also called the Prairie Avenue Courts, with the purpose of designing a building that received an ideal amount of daylight without casting too many shadows on the rooms. Merging architectural design with new technological materials and methods, Keck & Keck offered solar design strategies for improving the living conditions of their clients.
Source
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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.