New Bedford, Massachusetts · 1952–1956
Swain School of Design
James Dean grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, a mill city on the Rhode Island border, the fifth of six children raised by Sadie and John Dean. New Bedford was the next city over — fifteen miles up the coast, the old whaling capital of the world — and the Swain School of Design was the art school of the region. It was, for a young man from Fall River with artistic ability and not much money, the right place at the right time.
He served two years in the military before returning to complete his degree. He graduated from Swain in 1956, in the Commercial Art program, at the age of twenty-five. From there he went to work as a graphic designer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Six years later, in 1962, NASA administrator James Webb assigned him to establish what became the NASA Fine Arts Program — and the rest of that story is on this site.
The through-line is direct: Swain trained commercial artists, designers, and illustrators for professional practice, and it trained them well. The skills Dean developed there — layout, illustration, watercolor technique, design for print — were precisely what allowed him to build a program that communicated the space age to the American public through the work of artists, and to direct the visual communications of NASA for twelve years.
A First Professional Credit
“swain school of design — 75 years of service to new england”
catalogue designed by james dean
student — commercial art dept.
Back cover, Swain School of Design Catalogue, 1956 — Read the full catalogue at Archive.org →
The 1956 catalogue — the one you are reading if you follow that link — was designed by James Dean. That is his credit on the back cover, in the lowercase script that was fashionable in commercial design at the time: catalogue designed by james dean, student — commercial art dept. It was the school’s 75th anniversary year. That the catalogue for that occasion was assigned to a student, and that the student was Dean, says something about how his abilities were regarded at Swain. It was also, in a precise sense, his first professional design commission — a document that went to prospective students, parents, and administrators across New England.
Look at the catalogue itself and you can see what he was capable of at twenty-four: the green-ruled cover with the school’s Georgian Revival gallery building set in a framed vignette, the clean typography, the confident layout of the faculty photographs and schedule tables. It is not a student project. It is a finished piece of institutional communication.
The Director’s Award, 1956
James Dean's Director’s Award and the school catalog he designed, 1956
In his graduating year, James Dean received the Director’s Award — presented, according to the 1956 catalogue, to “the student attaining the highest average for four years.” It was the school’s highest academic honor, given by Director Hiram Rockwell Haggett. That it came in the same year Dean designed the school’s anniversary catalogue is a fitting coincidence: the same student who produced the most visible piece of design work of his class also turned in four years of the strongest academic record.
The School
The Swain School of Design had been part of New Bedford since 1882, founded under the will of shipping magnate William W. Swain as a free school for residents of the city who could not otherwise afford higher education. By the time Dean arrived in the early 1950s it was charging tuition — $185 per year for the day division — but it remained, in spirit, a school for people who came to art through work rather than through privilege. The 1956 catalogue describes its philosophy plainly: “No wasted motion. Clarification of the professional goal and concentrated effort towards its attainment is the framework upon which school policy is built.”
The two four-year diploma programs were Commercial Art and Fashion Illustration. The Commercial Art curriculum Dean followed was intensely practical: advertising illustration, layout, lettering, package design, airbrush, industrial design, silk screen printing, watercolor, oil painting, life drawing, etching, woodcuts, and lithography — sixty clock hours per week across junior and senior years, covering every medium a working studio artist might need. Liberal arts were threaded through: English, American literature, art history, American history, humanities, aesthetics.
The school ran cooperative work placements in the senior year, placing students in the art departments of a Boston department store and a New Bedford printing plant. The faculty were all working professionals. The teaching of watercolor fell to Francisco Rapoza, himself a watercolorist and muralist who held a Swain diploma. The catalogue notes that students went on painting tours organized by the school — along the Massachusetts coast, to Cape Cod, to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The landscape Dean would paint for the rest of his life — New England harbors and shoreline, the light on weathered wood — was right outside the school’s front door.
From the Commercial Art Curriculum, 1956
The senior year schedule included, across a 60-hour week: Packaging, Direct Mail, Lettering, Working Drawings, Portfolio Preparation, Model Making, Drawing, Silk Screen, Commercial Watercolor, Water Color Illustration, American Literature, Etching, Aesthetics, English, Water Color, Constitutional History, Humanities, Life Drawing, Painting, and Industrial Design.
Admission required three letters of recommendation, a glossy photograph, and a portfolio of at least six examples of the applicant’s work. A personal interview with the Director was mandatory. Freshman supply costs alone ran to $150 in the first year — $60 of it in the opening week.
His Teachers
- —Hiram Rockwell Haggett — Director of the School. Instructor in Commercial Illustration, Layout, Lettering, and Package Design. Background: Director of Commercial Art Studio, Retail Advertising Manager, University Instructor.
- —Francisco Rapoza — Instructor in Watercolor, Oil Painting, Perspective, Color Theory. Background: Oil Painter and Watercolorist, Mural Artist. A Swain diploma holder himself.
- —Edward Peter Togneri — Instructor in Modern Painting and Design. Background: Head of Art Department, Friends Academy; Painter; Director of Private Summer Art School.
- —Walter Eugene Owen — Instructor in Commercial Art, Design, and Sociology. Background: Professional Caricaturist and Editorial Cartoonist, Television Artist and Lecturer.
- —Arthur Zacharias — Instructor in Oil Painting and Fine Arts. Background: Commercial Artist, Instructor at Brown University.
- —Henry Joseph Rose — Instructor in Silk Screen Printing. Background: Owner and Operator of a Silk Screen, Design and Manufacturing Service.
- —Italo Joseph Belli — Instructor in Display and Machine Shop. Background: Textile Pattern Designer, Proprietor of Sign and Display Business.
The Setting
The catalogue describes the school’s location with the pride of a place that knows what it has. New Bedford sits on the coast of Buzzards Bay, at the mouth of the Acushnet River. In the 1950s it was still a working waterfront city — fishing boats, textile mills, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society’s famous whaling museum nearby on Johnny Cake Hill. Cape Cod was an hour’s drive. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket were a ferry ride away.
The campus itself was a cluster of buildings in the residential neighborhood around Hawthorn Street: the Georgian Revival Crapo Gallery (built in 1927, where student and visiting exhibitions were held), a separate studio building for upperclassmen, a ceramics building, and the main school. Students going on painting tours had, as the catalogue puts it, “access to some of the most beautiful marine and coastal scenery on the east coast.”
For a young man from Fall River who had grown up riding the carousel at Lincoln Park and watching the harbor, this was home territory — familiar light, familiar water, familiar industry. He was not discovering a new landscape at Swain. He was learning, for the first time, how to look at the one he already knew.
“My paintings often bring back sudden flashes of memory. It’s very satisfying to realize that often my work makes people aware that commonplace things can have great beauty.”
— James D. Dean — Fall River Herald News, May 1975
Swain closed in 1988, merging with Southeastern Massachusetts University to become part of what is now the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Its archive — 86 manuscript boxes, catalogues, student records, and photographs — is held by the Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth. The 1956 catalogue that Dean designed survives there, and in digitized form, as a document both of the school and of the young man who made it.
