Helen Farnsworth Mears was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and began to sculpt at an early age, relying on anatomy lessons from her father (who had studied to be a surgeon) and using the family woodshed as a studio. She displayed an early talent, winning a county fair award for a bust of Apollo at the age of 9 and at the age of 21 — before any formal training — received her first commission from the State of Wisconsin for a sculpture for the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1893, the same year her Genius of Wisconsin premiered at the World Fair, she undertook a two-year assistantship in New York with the famed sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. From New York, she traveled to Paris, where she worked with Frederick MacMonnies—another former Saint Gaudens apprentice—and the French sculptors Denys Puech and Alexandre Charpentier. She opened her own studio in New York in 1899, where she accepted numerous commissions, winning a silver medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exhibition. She was the first woman to have a sculpture placed in the Statuary Hall in the National Capitol in Washington, D.C. In 1911, she lost a major commission for the Wisconsin State Capitol building and fell into extreme poverty. She died in 1916 at the age of 43 from pulmonary edema.
In her notebook, the artist described Dawn and Labor thusly:
"To express the mystery of life in its deeper, more spiritual significance, the onward sweep of the soul toward the light is what I had in mind in the group Dawn and Labor. I feel that art to be representative of this age must express the real life of the soul as well as the marvel of its material envelope."