How Dropping Out of Art School Became One of the Most Fruitful Decisions Charles Mason III Ever Made

AGE: 34
BASED: Baltimore

Charles Mason III got accepted into one of the country’s more competitive graduate art programs without ever taking a painting class. After studying graphic design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he “compiled anything fine-art related” from his undergraduate career into an application to the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York. He got in.

Mason didn’t stay long—he dropped out after a few months in 2014 to return to Baltimore, where the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam. “I wanted to be on the ground back home and protest,” he says. But even a few months was long enough to make an impact. He met artists like former New School instructor Steffani Jemison and for the first time, saw “Black and brown artists who were successful, teaching, and showing.” In the 10 years since, Mason has returned to New York to show at esteemed spaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venus Over Manhattan, and Simone Subal Gallery.

He began to find his own voice as an artist in 2017, when he resumed his formal studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (He graduated with his MFA in 2019.) One of his teachers suggested he look at the work of Anselm Kiefer. “It took me the whole semester to finally watch this video—what is this white German going to tell me?” Mason recalls thinking. Soon after clicking play, however, he was struck by Kiefer’s use of sunflowers to explore themes of trauma, rebirth, and endurance.

The encounter sparked Mason’s own interest in the flower as a recurring motif in his paintings and collages. His interpretation is childlike and graphic, sometimes appearing front and center, and other times poking out from behind a swirl of abstract lines or layers of rope, fabric, and paper. The Baltimore-based artist sees the flower as a rich symbol that ties him to his father and grandfather. “There’s the phrase, ‘Give people their flowers while they are with us,’” Mason says. “How do I celebrate people while thinking about what they endure? What are the conditions for someone to love the Black body? What are the conditions for someone to love me?”