Manierre Dawson

Born in Chicago, Manierre Dawson was an engineering student at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). He worked for an architectural firm in Chicago and in 1910 traveled Europe, dividing his time between architecture, visits to museums, and his own self-taught painting and sketching. Not long after his return to the United States, he devoted himself to painting, and by 1914 he had settled in Ludington, Michigan, where he married and became a fruit farmer. Dawson continued to paint, and took up sculpture, but the arduous labor of farming limited his production for the next few decades. His success as a farmer gave him more money to pursue artmaking in the 1950s, when the Dawsons began wintering in Sarasota, Florida, home to a flourishing art colony. An exhibition in 1966 finally brought critical attention to Dawson as one of the first American abstract painters.