As a student of painting at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art during the early 1970s, Dumas gained exposure to the decade’s preoccupation with conceptualism and art theory.
Among his important articles: "Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol.
Beginning as an underground political-artistic move against the use of Socialist realism as a method of social control and becoming a full-fledged movement with the Moscow Conceptualists, Russian conceptualism used the symbolism of Socialist realism against the Soviet government.