Pop-up exhibit shows the inter-generational pull of art for mother & son, Mary & Ian Dawson

By DAVID DUPONT

BG Independent News

A mother and son are hosting a pop up gallery this weekend to celebrate the evolution in their art.

“NeXT Generation: Work of Ian Dawson & Mary Dawson” will be on display in the Bowling Green Arts Council’s ArtSpace, in the rear of Coyote Beads, 178 S. Main Bowling Green, Thursday, Aug. 8, Friday Aug. 9, and Saturday, Aug. 10, 5-8 p.m. each day. An opening reception will be held on Thursday.

(Visitors are asked to use the rear entrance after 6 p.m.)

When the ArtSpace gallery opened last year, Mary Dawson explained, the intent was to make it available for artists to rent for pop-up shows. She and her son are the first to take advantage of that.

The show features dozens of pieces — all for sale — by both artists. The work shows how their art has been developing recently.

Mary Dawson is exhibiting both the ceramic sculptures that’s she’s been working on for years, as well as the painting, which she has been concentrating on in the past year.

Mary has been focused on art since she was a a child. Because of her father’s job, her family moved around the Midwest frequently. She said her memories of childhood revolve around the drawings she started making. One series, she said, was a sort of Frank Stella-like post-Modern abstraction, though she’d never been exposed to that style before.

Her parents, she said, “thought me rather dull.”

Still she continue to focus on art, graduating early from BGSU in 1969. She traveled to Puerto Rico to manage an art gallery there. She worked on sculpture.

To make a living, Mary Dawson had a career in graphic design. She said she would works in spurts, focusing on creating ceramic sculptures for a couple of years before realizing she had to turn her attention back to earning a living.

Now retired she’s able to concentrate on art. “I wanted to reinvent myself.” First that meant weaving vessels from wire, but the work was repetitious so she turned to painting. The paintings are florals with the petals filling the canvas.

She explains: “The tight crop of the flowers are meant to create an intimacy with the viewer — to focus the color and the sensuous fluidity of natural forms.”

Ian Dawson recalls his mother introducing him to ceramics when he was a child.

“I dragged him to a lot of museums,” Mary Dawson added.

Ian worked in various fields though, not turning back to art until he was 32, and even then it was short-lived. He started doing metal work but got entangled in a toxic relationship which derailed his work. It was only when he left that relationship and moved back BG in 2022, where his mother had settled in 2021. and where they have family ties through the Dapogny family, that he began to focus on art.

Arriving in town he realized the School of Art had a glass program and decided to explore art. Even then he was intrigued by the possibility of merging glass work with metal. His connection with metal goes back through his great-grandfather Alexander Dapogny whose family owned a foundry in France before immigrating to the United States. Later Dapogny started the foundry at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Ian’s studies at BGSU lasted only a year. He also studied glass at the Toledo Museum of Art. Then he sought out regional artists who he felt had the vision to help him develop the skills he needed to realize his vision. That included Jim Yarrito, who combines glass and metal, and glass workers Baker O’Brien, and Shawn Messenger.

He’s traveled with his mother to Italy to work with master craftsmen at the Murano glassworks.

He won a Juror Award at the 2024 Ohio State Fair for his piece “Samurai.”

It was Messenger’ husband, glass sculptor Jack Schmidt who asked him the question that helped him put his art and life in perspective. What is your goal?

Ian Dawson replied: “I want to make the most beautiful things I can.”