C. Daniel Dawson, Olaifa and Egypt, 1978

C. Daniel Dawson: This is actually my goddaughter. It's a portrait of her. Her father was a brilliant, brilliant painter, Charles Abramson. And this is Olaifa Abramson-Ramos.

Narrator: C. Daniel Dawson.

C. Daniel Dawson: This was Olaifa's face when she was a young woman fused with the faces from the statues in the Egyptian collection in a museum, I think from the Metropolitan Museum, I think the Met although it could have been the Brooklyn Museum.

I was very much into Egyptology and also very much into the Africanity of Egypt, which was being denied by the standard academic world. I think it's no longer denied in Egyptological circles that Egypt is and was a part of Africa.

Narrator: Dawson has said that this photograph reflects a kind of “mythopoetics,” a word he uses in the spirit of the musician and composer Sun Ra. Drawing on myths and archetypes, it suggests larger meanings and veiled realities.

C. Daniel Dawson: You're talking about Egyptian mythology, Black reality, Egypt as being Black, all these things were kind of fused into that, too. So, again, it's kind of compressive of ideas into one piece.

Actually, it was really funny because this photograph became a mural for mounting on a wall. In this case, it was on the interior walls of one of the state office buildings, or city office buildings in the Bronx. But I don't know what happened to it. I don't know if they threw it out. But we had it printed as a large mural. It must have been like 40 by 60 inches, a huge piece put up on the wall of one of these buildings. And I don't what they thought when they saw it, but it was my kind of mythopoetic propaganda at the time.