Interview with Douglas Dawson Gallery in Chicago

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Douglas Dawson Gallery: 30 Years of Tribal Art Douglas Dawson Gallery is a serene art destination hidden behind a steel entry wall off of Morgan St. in the heart of the city’s meat packing district. When you walk up the stone walkway under the cover of the wood trellis you are aware that you’re about to enter a gallery unlike any other in Chicago. The gallery turns 30 at the end of this year, and for the occasion gallery directors and partners Doug Dawson and Wally Bowling spent some time over tea one rainy summer morning to talk about running a contemporary gallery that deals in ethnographic art and ancient artifacts. Unique challenges face them as they try to reach the next generation of collectors while managing new realities of sourcing and authenticity, but the two have relied on experience and perspective to get them where they are today. -GV Doug Dawson credits his entry into the gallery business to a potent combination of naïveté and terror. 30 years ago, when he moved to Chicago from a political collective in northeast Iowa, Dawson had never been in an art gallery. He admits, “I very naïvely decided to open one. In retrospect, it all seems like great strategizing, but in fact it was dumb luck.” His timing was also fortunate, since he happened to rent a River North loft space in 1983, when the area was just beginning to bubble. Dawson reflects he was delighted to find himself suddenly in the middle of what was fast becoming the hot contemporary art neighborhood of Chicago.

Shibipo ceramics on display in the gallery’s main space.

actually prefer them to tribal art fairs. If you interview our collectors most will tell you they’re contemporary art collectors.” Collecting tribal art has a long and dynamic history that surprises many people. As Dawson says, “In fact, early French artists were collectors of Today, the gallery has been in the West Loop this material too – they were affirmed and infor seven years. Dawson has seen many spired by it. Their own art was ratified by it. changes since opening the gallery three Interestingly there has been – a major paradecades ago, but one constant has been the digm change in that relationship. If you look at gallery’s focus on tribal art. When he first French artists in 1915 they were looking at opened he used a contemporary gallery model tribal art and seeing in it issues they were dealto hold openings and complementary activities ing with in their own art. Today it’s just flipped like lectures, as well as thematic exhibitions. completely - it’s understood and evaluated by Dawson credits this structure with helping looking first at 20th Century art. People come him reach a larger, more energized audience of in and say ‘That looks just like a Giacometti’, contemporary collectors than just those who for instance. That’s how it’s validated.” collected tribal art. The contemporary juxtaposition, he explains, means that someone who All these overlapping interests would seem to encounters an ancient piece doesn’t have to indicate a broad audience for tribal art, but have expert knowledge about Burkina Faso; it Dawson admits that engaging a young audidoesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of the ence with this material can be challenging Ashanti tribe. A new context can dispel insetoday. He says, “There’s less interest in noncurities, and, Dawson says, help fill in the gaps western culture. Young people don’t travel like later. our generation did. There’s a kind of ambivalence now. And tribal art certainly isn’t cool.

To continue to offer new contexts and to keep Someone can spend $200,000 on a prethings fresh, the gallery occasionally showColumbian textile, for example, take it home, cases contemporary art, working with artists put it on the wall, have a party, and 98% of the who see the ancient work in new ways – a people there will have no idea what it is, let strategy Dawson explains complements other alone how much they’ve spent. It doesn’t make pieces in the gallery. He says, “As much as we the kind of impact that contemporary art can need to keep our clients interested we need to for people who collect by the numbers. You keep ourselves interested. In dollars it’s a small can’t brand it.” part of the business, but in interest it generates a lot. It’s harder and harder to do shows just Another challenge that affects Dawson’s maron ethnographic art, so this helps fill our open- ket, as well as the antique market he says, is ings calendar as well as put older works in a what he sees going on with interior design. new light.” Many of Dawson’s collectors are “All dealers are loathe to admit that’s a really also interested in minimalism, conceptual art, major engine in the art world but it is. Trends even antiques, so parallels are easily found. in interior design now seem very conservative, very corporate. We hear young people aren’t Dawson and Bowling cross boundaries in really using interior designers anymore. They other practical ways as well. Dawson explains, buy a loft and a TV screen bigger than the “We participate in contemporary art fairs – we

house we grew up in, a Crate & Barrel sofa, and then LOTS of electronic toys. That’s kind of it.” Dawson and I discussed how actually, many pieces that have become best sellers at the big box stores that appeal to transient young people, are in fact inspired by, if not copies of, unique pieces from far flung countries or long ago eras. If people feel they can obtain an apothecary coffee table that looks like it came from a remote village in South East Asia with the click of a button, and free shipping, why would they seek out a well-traveled dealer who’s actually gone to the trouble to procure the real thing from a real village?

Dealers, as well as individuals used to have to travel more to find such treasures. But Bowling says that even if you travelled that way, especially on your own, you wouldn’t necessarily such things anymore. He says, “So it’s kind of a catch-22. When we used to travel more it was more readily available. You’d get excited about pieces in-situ. People just got excited about the third world, but now it all looks very western. Villagers are wearing t-shirts shipped from the US. There are no ceramics. Instead, you see Michael Jackson’s face printed everywhere. It’s a different perception of the world now generally.”

The number of younger collectors who frequent the gallery is small, but Bowling cites a handful who are new to tribal art. He believes, “If you know you want to collect something, pre-Columbian ceramics are amazing. A lot of people think because of the age, prices must be out of reach; we do have to reflect the market, but if you look at what goes at the major auction houses today, these things are much less than contemporary counterpoints, and they have some history.”

Dawson thinks any younger collector should first be curious. He advises, “Don’t expect to buy right away, but do look and wonder on

Printed in September-December 2012 issue of Chicago Gallery News. Not to be reproduced without permission from CGN.

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Printed in September-December 2012 issue of Chicago Gallery News. Not to be reproduced without permission from CGN. “Not long ago,” Dawson says, “we had a large prehistoric African terra cotta figure and the head had been broken off. In that world of African archeological ceramics there’s a lot of forgery - mixing of pieces and reconstructing things. The client wanted to be sure we had the right head for the body. We sent it to McCrone Associates in suburban Chicago for a host of tests, like thermoluminescence, which determines when a ceramic was submitted to a certain temperature. Both the head and the body came out equally correct in that test.

Then, they ground up samples from both parts and those came out perfectly. They xrayed. Then, they drilled into a point where the ceramic hadn’t gotten hot enough to carbonize organic material, and they found animal hair that had been used as a bonding agent. These pieces are 2,500 years old. They pulled a hair out of the head, and a hair out of the body and did DNA tests. The hairs came from the same female goat. Ultimately they said it was “highly likely” - the most definitive statement they’ll make - that the two parts were made at the same time, from the same lump of clay, by the same person. We will go that far to determine authenticity.”

Ricketts textiles showcased at the entrance of the gallery

any kind of level – aesthetic, technical, historical. When we were younger we used to go to so many galleries and just see and absorb.”

He is frustrated by art students who come in but don’t really look at pieces in the gallery.

He’s lectured classes in the space, only to have no one come back, and he wonders where they are getting their messages. “For me the ideal is being curious and asking questions, wondering about the people who made these things – it broadens my idea of human experience. That’s what art is. I think it’s important people know about the world.”

A museum experience is naturally quite different role than the one a gallery provides, especially in a field like tribal art. Locally, Dawson looks to the Art Institute and its excellent collection. He says the head of the department that deals with tribal art is probably the best in the United States, but it still remains a department that has a very low profile in Chicago. He says, “There’s no energized community around this material here. That affects business. There are some other dealers in Chicago who are participating in the same market that we are, but no one is doing international shows and seeking the same national level. I’m not demeaning anyone, but it would be nice if there were more galleries dealing in this kind of art in order to give people something to compare.”

These awareness challenges are all the more reason that visitors should be attracted to Dawson’s gallery and unique field. In the gallery visitors encounter prime examples of tribal art as well as moving insights into world history. Bowling, a trained architect himself, points out that the space was designed to look like the houses their clients might have. Small rooms and spaces allow you to discover things. He says, “There’s an intimacy that you don’t get in a museum. You can look at a piece here and respond in your own setting.”

Dawson says visitors are invited to come in, touch things, ask an expert questions. It’s a rare point of access.

Dawson and Bowling have gone to great distances to give clients that kind of up-close access, traveling the globe to art fairs and remote destinations to bring the best of the world’s tribal art to collectors. Their specialty also involves regularly going through hoops.

One of the primary obstacles demonstrates how recent issues of our own security have resulted in newer challenges of dealing in tribal art. Dawson says, “the Patriot Act really has become sort of a nightmare in the art business, where everything is suspect. Dealing with the Federal Government, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Customs – to get a clarification of what you can and cannot do, it’s almost impossible.”

Dawson and Bowling say they travel a lot less than they used to, partly because of the recession, and partly because they haven’t needed to replace inventory as often. Bowling says the two do more internal travel and less foreign, and the foreign travel is more for pleasure. Still, they manage to travel about a quarter of the year, but art fairs largely dictate travel. Their recent ventures would still fill many of us with wanderlust: South America, Asia, and throughout Africa. Trips usually involve seeing contacts, visiting museums, and staying up to date with other collections.

Travel is often not when acquisitions are actually made, since as Dawson points out, acquisitions are almost never from the country of origin. He explains, “The things we’d want would be illegal to import or export in most cases. We buy things that have impeccable provenance and authenticity, and to do that we must spend a lot of time going through a great deal of steps. We have a good museum business, and it’s more and more difficult to sell to museums now because of concerns about provenance and authenticity. For instance, we’re more likely to look to buy things from this country or Europe than we are from Mexico or Peru or Indonesia.”

Authenticity is a serious matter, particularly since Dawson has a strong museum business.

Regarding their base in Chicago, Dawson says it’s a sort of double-edged sword: “We do have some second city syndrome here, where people will prefer to buy things in New York or Paris, particularly in the art world, since that has a sort of caché. That said we have been here for 30 years. Chicago is a great city that draws a lot of people in for numerous events.” He admits to a familiar dealer quandary, “We couldn’t survive in Chicago just on Chicago. It’s because we’ve developed a national reputation that we can do what we do here. But I think that’s true of everyone.

That’s what keeps everyone open in this city.

Dawson says that above all they’ve enjoyed a great run in Chicago. Most of the obstacles they’ve faced have in fact been in place from the beginning, and here they still are after three decades. For our space, this is a protected manufacturing district, so we are able to have this sculpture gallery and to make the gallery a destination. Obviously we could not have all of this in too many other cities.”

A contemporary piece by gallery artist Frank Connet

Douglas Dawson Gallery www.douglasdawson.com 400 N Morgan (60607) • 312-226-7975 The gallery will be participating in EXPO Chicago at Navy Pier September 20-23, 2012.