Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd (b. 1927) is a celebrated American painter known for depictions of the natural and domestic world that surrounded her. For more than six decades, she has focused on the places she knows intimately such as New York’s Lower East Side, coastal Maine, and the Delaware Water Gap, painting gardens, houses, windows, plants, and night skies with a clear and understated approach. Working primarily on wood panels, she often paints outdoors in a single sitting, returning to the same motifs across seasons and years to explore subtle shifts in structure and mood. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Dodd studied at Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952, she was a founding member of Tanager Gallery, one of New York’s first artist-run cooperative galleries, which played a key role in the post-war downtown art scene. She later taught for many years at Brooklyn College and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy.

Dodd’s work has been the subject of over fifty solo exhibitions as well as a major retrospective organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. Her work can be found in permanent collections of museums throughout the United States and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Morgan Library and Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum, among others.