Early Career

After traveling in Mexico, Charles Shannon returned to Montgomery, Alabama and rented studio space on the second floor of a former servant’s quarters downtown at Lawrence and Church Streets.  He made a meager living teaching an art class there once a week and from an occasional portrait commission, while he painted the Deep South he loved.

In January 1937, Shannon had his first solo exhibition, Charles Shannon, at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Included in the exhibition were oils on canvas, watercolors, drawings and several of his portraits.

The following year, in January of 1938, Shannon age 23, had a solo exhibition, Charles Shannon, Paintings and Drawings, at the Cleveland School of Art Gallery, Ohio. It was the first time that the gallery was offered to a former student so soon after graduation. Winsor French's review of the exhibtion in the Cleveland Press, January 9, 1938,  stated, "Whatever his (Charles Shannon's) subject, the result is graphic, bold and brilliantly descriptive."

While in Cleveland, Shannon visited the Cleveland Museum of Art. There a staff member told him about the newly established Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship for White Southerners working on problems distinctive to the south and helped Shannon apply. 

In April of 1938, Shannon became the first white artist to receive a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, an award for “southerners devoting themselves to problems specific to the south.” His Fellowship would be renewed the following year. 

Leonard Hanna, Jr., a member of a prominent Cleveland, Ohio industrial family and a patron of the arts, had purchased Charles Shannon's painting, The Red Flower, in 1937 before his solo Cleveland show.  Hanna who had a permanent residence in New York City,  encouraged Shannon to travel to New York City to find a dealer for his work. With Hanna's guidance, Shannon showed his work to art dealers. A solo exhibition was arranged for him at the prestigious Jacques Seligmann and Company gallery, 3 East Fifty-First Street, New York, New York for May 1938. 

On May 9, 1938 the exhibition, Charles Shannon, Paintings of the South, opened at Jacques Seligman gallery in New York City and it included twenty-two oil paintings, ten gouaches on canvas board and a group of drawings. The exhibition was well received. 

In Howard Devree’s review of the exhibition in the New York Times, May 15, 1938 , he wrote: “One of the most distinctive first showings of the season...all of Shannon’s work is personal and striking, with real emotional impact and with a remarkable degree of achievement in one so young.’ A review in Newsweek, May 1938 stated: "March, a landscape of lyric beauty, has depth and atmosphere which shows the artist's talent in dealing with a scene not especially focused on human interest". 

After his New York show, Shannon returned to Montgomery to close his studio. The Rosenwald award allowed him to make repairs on his log cabin/studio in Searcy, which enabled him to live and work there full time.  

On February 18, 1939, Shannon’s painting, The Lover, was exhibited in the Golden Gate International Exposition, which opened at the Fine Arts Pavilion on Treasure Island, San Francisco, California. Over 800 paintings and 60 sculptures were included in the exhibition. Sixteen thousand dollars in prizes would be awarded. 

In February 1939 , before prizes were announced, the New York critic, Irma deB. Sompayra wrote in Art and Artist of Today, regarding Shannon's painting The Lover,  "... in the curving torso, the set of heaving shoulders, the big bony hands, deft analysis of the miracle that has put upon it the stamp of absent love. Shannon, who is only 24 years old, has created a vital art, in the opinion of this critic. He has had one New York exhibition, at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery two years ago (a year ago, May 1938), at which time he favorably impressed the critics..” 

In late June, his painting, The Lover, was awarded Third Prize in the unrestricted category of the Golden Gate International Exposition, George Braque, received the first prize for his painting, The Yellow Cloth, Franklin Watkins received the second prize for his painting Negro Spiritual in the same category.

On July 10, 1939 an article, Golden Gate Awards, in Newsweek, stated: “Thirteen Americans and eleven Europeans shared $15,000 in prizes last week to contemporary artist exhibiting at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. George Braque, 58-year-old Paris war veteran and disciple of Picasso, with whom he founded Cubism, walked off with the $2,500 unrestricted first prize. His work was The Yellow Cloth—an abstraction already familiar to art lovers because it took first prize in the 1937 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Second prize in the unrestricted category went to the veteran Franklin Watkins of Philadelphia, who placed first in the Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C., earlier this season. The outstanding newcomer was Charles E. Shannon, 24-year-old Montgomery, Al., painter, whose principal subjects are Negroes. His, The Lover, rated the $500 third prize."

 In the fall of 1938, at his cabin in Searcy,  Shannon began to develop an idea to create a place in Montgomery for people interested in contemporary art to share ideas and support each other’s efforts to foster the arts in the southeast. Shannon instigated the first documented meeting to organize New South art center, at The Tavern in downtown Montgomery, along with a small number of writer and musician friends. After several meetings a board was established comprised of the seven original members of the organizing committee that included Charles Shannon. A constitution was arrived at which established the following groups: a writer's group, a music group, a discussion group, an art group and a theatre group. The groups themselves decided on their activities with the approval of the board. Open seven days a week, New South was operated by an all-volunteer staff. It was funded by a small bookstore and modest membership fees. On weekends, Shannon came from Searcy, Butler County, to Montgomery and was in charge of New South.

In May 1939, New South opened its first location on Dexter Ave. in downtown Montgomery. The first art exhibitions at New South were eleven paintings by John Lapsley, the social realist painter, a native of Selma, Alabama, who had studied and shown in New York City and Shearwater Pottery by the Anderson brothers, Peter, Walter (the painter) and James of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Charles Shannon never had an exhibition of his work at New South. 

 On June 5, 1939, Charles Shannon’s painting, November, was shown in the exhibition, American Art Today, Twenty-Fifth Annual Oil Exhibition, Ferargil Galleries, New York, New York, in conjunction with the 1939 New York World’s Fair’s fine art bus tour of leading galleries, The New York World’s Fair opened in Queens, New York, representing a vision of the World of Tomorrow with omens of war. The fair boasted that it represented over 60 countries. The only major world power that did not participate for the 1939 season was Germany. 

In early June 1939, Bill Traylor (age 85) and Charles Shannon (age 24) met for the first time in downtown Montgomery. The historian Josef Helfenstein wrote: "Today we know that without this meeting-an encounter between an African American artist and his white counterpart in a region marked by the worst racial segregation in the American South-Traylor’s work would have been forgotten and destroyed".

In early July 1939, because of increased interest and participation,  New South moved to a larger space on Commerce Street in downtown Montgomery.   Shannon taught a life drawing class there on Friday nights and painting and drawing classes on Saturday mornings. 

At the new locatioin,  Charles Shannon and John Lapsley decided to each paint a mural to go alongside an interior door at New South. Shannon’s mural was to be of Bill Traylor drawing. Shannon took his first roll of film of what would become his Monroe Street Area Photographs with the intent of photographing Bill Traylor’s hands as studies for his mural. The photographs showed Bill Traylor drawing as well as street life in the Monroe Street area (the Africian-American commercial center of downtown segregated Montgomery).

 In early December 1939, Shannon was contacted by the Guggenheim Foundation (who had judged his art for the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship) regarding the Detroit artist David Fridenthal who was then living in New York City. Fridenthal had been awarded a Guggenheim grant to do the illustrations for a new addition of Erskine Caldwell's novel Tobacco Road. Shannon was asked to "help show Fridenthal around." Shannon agreed. 

David Fridenthal drove to Alabama and they both travelled to Wrens, Georgia where they visited homes of poverty-stricken white sharecroppers with the Rev. Caldwell, father of the author Erskine Caldwell. Here Shannon experienced the appalling condition of white sharecroppers for the first time and was deeply affected, which is reflected in his art of that period.

In January 1940, Charles Shannon, age 26, accepted a position with the Julius Rosenwald Fund/University of Georgia’s Challenge Grant/Experimental Rural Education Project at West Georgia College, Carrollton, Georgia. In accord with the challenge grant, Shannon was partly compensated for his work on the project by an Artist-In-Residency at West Georgia College and given studio space. He had no obligation to teach, but participated in excursions and discussions with a team of national educators and specialists.

 The project’s mission was to develop a model viable for the entire South to address problems in the education of rural children, both black and white. Existing schools were to be transformed into centers for learning and cooperation for the adult population devastated by the Depression. Information on ways for sharecroppers to regain land, on diversified agriculture, the forming of cooperatives, access to state subsidies, the marketing of craft products, educational programs as well as health and nutrition were offered. Shannon felt that this project was an important opportunity to make a difference---so much so that he willingly gave up his life in Butler County and Montgomery and moved to Carrollton, Georgia to be a part of it.  During this time, Shannon’s paintings continued to be shown in national exhibitions and he traveled regularly to Montgomery, Alabama on weekends to help at New South and to see Bill Traylor.

 In February of 1940, the exhibition Bill Traylor, People’s Artist opened at New South. This was Bill Traylor’s first solo exhibition.

In March of 1940,  New South soon came to an end with much regret. Depending on volunteers to operate, it had become impossible to sustain. Before the year ended, all of the young men from New South had registered for the WWII draft, including Shannon who had a deferment until the end of the school year at West Georgia College in May 1942.