McArthur Dawkins has spent more than 50 years making art. He made his livelihood out of it– teaching art for 32 years.

So when his sons, Travis and Darrell Dawkins heard their father’s artwork was taking on water damage sitting in his workshop, they knew they had to do something to save his life’s work.

Together, the pair created a book of their father’s artwork, “Portrait of a Father and Artist: McArthur Dawkins.” Now, the first edition of the book is available at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, with a second version on the way for a wider public audience.

Initially, Darrell said, he started pulling out pieces of his father’s artwork to physically restore them in 2022. He took photos of some pieces along the way to document them.

“I decided we had to save as much as possible,” Darrell said. “That meant re-matting some of the pictures. Some of them had gotten mildew odor in them and stains in them. … But if (his mother) hadn’t recognized the problem, we could have lost a lot more than that.”

Travis, seeing some pieces he hadn’t seen in 30 years, had another idea– creating a digital gallery of his father’s work. He started taking high-quality photographs of the artwork, retouching them with digital software to restore the pieces to their original states.

“Basically all of these pieces, with the exception of a few, I remember watching him produce when I was coming up as a child,” Travis said. “So I know what it was supposed to look like originally.”

Eventually, the brothers had another idea– making the gallery into a book to put into their father’s hands.

Travis compiled photos of artwork from the 1960s all the way through 2022 for the book, along with taking photos of his father in his workshop to add into the mix. Altogether, the book contains about 100 pages.

Travis sent the design to a print shop in New York, and by February 2023, the book was ready to present to McArthur as an early Father’s Day gift.

“I was sitting in my chair and they said ‘Dad, we’ve got an early Father’s Day gift for you,’” McArthur said. “And when he presented that to me, I couldn’t say (anything).”

Teacher, artist and father

Flipping through the pages seemed to bring back memories for McArthur.

On the first page of the book, there is a personal note from Travis to his father about the book’s creation. Across from it, there is a picture of McArthur teaching in one of his many classrooms.

McArthur said he never intended to become a teacher. But while he was attending Mississippi Valley State, his path toward art became more clear.

“My senior year, I began to look at possibilities for me outside of college and there was nothing for a Black man but to teach,” McArthur told The Dispatch.

McArthur said he started working as a teacher at R. E. Hunt High School in 1967, before the schools consolidated in the 1970s. Once the schools integrated, McArthur started working at S.D. Lee High School.

McArthur said that, due to budget constraints, he ended up teaching at multiple schools at the same time. He would often drive from Hunt to Lee to teach classes on the same day, and eventually to Joe Cook Elementary and Caldwell High School (now Columbus High School).

While budget cuts were challenging, McArthur said they also meant he became more creative with the kinds of materials he used in the classroom. He developed a paper mache technique that was less messy than a traditional paper mache style for one of his classes– a style he later became well known for.

As a teacher, McArthur also became known as someone that students could share their issues with, he said, leading some of his students to call him “dad” and call his sons “brothers” to this day.

Over the years, McArthur said, he gave away many of his pieces to his former students, including his paper mache pieces. Only a few pieces of his paper mache artwork survived to be featured in the book because of it.

But over the course of decades, he also worked in ceramics, watercolors, oil painting, acrylic painting, charcoal, pastels and more.

Putting together the book, Travis said, allowed him to see different phases of his father’s artwork as his style developed over time. Some changes, he said, came as his father learned from his mistakes, while other changes came for more unique reasons.

In the 1970s, Travis said, his father predominantly painted with oil paints. But in the 1980s, his predominant medium became acrylic painting.

“I was told I was allergic to the ingredient in linseed oil… which is one of the components you use in oil painting,” Travis said. “So he stopped oil painting and started doing acrylic painting.”

Over time, McArthur created publicly recognizable pieces of art, Darrell said, including designs for the exterior of the Rosenzweig Arts Center, the original Columbus High School logo and the Columbus Municipal School District logo. These artworks are included in the book, along with McArthur’s personal pieces.

When he wasn’t teaching in the classroom, McArthur said he also led workshops for Community Counseling and the juvenile detention center. Once he retired from teaching, he also started serving on boards to continue promoting art in the community.

Sharing Black history

While the Dawkins brothers initially made the book as a present for their father and a keepsake for his relatives, it quickly became clear that the book needed to be shared with others.

Darrell said he was surprised when family members, friends, former art students and church members started asking where they could get copies.

“We didn’t think anyone else was going to be buying it, but several people bought it,” Darrell said. “And then the library bought a copy. So it went from a Father’s Day gift to basically Black history.”

Travis said that since others started showing interest in the book, he has been working to produce a second edition with a new publisher to make a more widely-accessible version of the book.

During the process, Travis said he has been brainstorming ideas with Columbus-Lowndes Public Library archivist Mona Vance-Ali on information a future book should contain to present his father’s history to a wider audience.

Currently, Vance-Ali said, the library’s archives has a copy of the first edition available for patrons to peruse, which it got back in September 2023. She said the plan is to keep the first edition and to add the second edition to the archives when it becomes available.

“Part of what we want so greatly is to continue to document African American local history before it’s gone,” Vance-Ali said. “And an individual like McArthur, without his sons telling his story, a lot of times, those stories are lost. So the fact that they actually created this book, published it, and we now have it? His story will go on for the next generation and on. We’re lucky.”

While McArthur said he is happy to share the book and the artwork inside, he made sure to emphasize that he is also excited to see his sons follow in his footsteps as artists. He told The Dispatch multiple times that the book was really their project– not his.

“To see both of them as they are, I’m proud they are my sons,” McArthur said.

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