'Dawn Column V' is part of a room-sized installation, 'Dawn's Wedding Feast,' which was the only piece Nevelson created using all white. Each of its components represents an aspect of a wedding ceremony: four wall sculptures stand for chapels, smaller pieces for objects in a trousseau, vertical structures for the bride and groom, and both floor and hanging columns for guests. Nevelson originally created Dawn's Wedding Feast at the invitation of curator Dorothy Miller for MoMA’s 1959–60 exhibition, 'Sixteen Americans.' Nevelson made an excess amount of components, and the installation of 'Dawn's Wedding Feast' at MoMA included seven standing columns out of the eleven columns Nevelson created for the piece in total. Later iterations of the installation have variously included 'Dawn Column V' and not. The artist, who often professed an aversion to marriage, pieced together discarded pieces of wooden material, such as broken moldings and finials, and then painted the assemblages a uniform color. Her use of white— a departure from her usual black— underlines the nuptial theme. According to Nevelson, though, the type of marriage exemplified in Dawn's Wedding Feast is not a romantic one between partners, but rather the artist's own "transition to marriage with the world." Here, "white permits a little something to enter... whites move out a little bit into outer space with more freedom." This freedom is further typified by the use of the word "Dawn" in the title, both a popular woman's name in the 1950s and 60s and the word designating the first appearance of daylight. Says Nevelson, "It is early morning when you arise between night and dawn. When you've slept and the city has slept, you get a psychic vision of an awakening. White invites more activity. The world is a little bit asleep and you are basically more alive to what's coming through the day."
