Lois Dodd b. 1927
Born in 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey, artist Lois Dodd is a painter celebrated for her observational, plein-air studies of everyday scenes, including rural landscapes, gardens, and window views. Dodd's career spans over fifty years, during which she has painted places she knows intimately, such as the Lower East Side of New York City, Maine's Mid-Coast, and the Delaware Water Gap. Her small-scale paintings, often completed in a single sitting, capture fleeting natural light and seasonal shifts in familiar settings. Critic Roberta Smith has noted Dodd's unique ability to "search out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life" in her subjects, bringing a sense of quiet strangeness to the familiar.
A Cooper Union graduate, Dodd was a key figure in New York's postwar art scene and helped shape its direction by co-founding the Tanager Gallery in 1952, one of the first artist-run cooperatives in New York. She exhibited regularly at Tanager Gallery for a decade and later at the Green Mountain Gallery, while also teaching at Brooklyn College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Dodd is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Her work has been the subject of over fifty solo exhibitions since 1954. In 2012, a major retrospective organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, further solidifying her place in American art.
Dodd's work resides in various prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Known for her refusal to romanticize or idealize her subjects, Dodd captures quotidian moments and environments with clarity and restraint, reflecting an intimate connection with her surroundings. Recent exhibitions, a 2017 monograph published by Lund Humphries, and numerous career honors underscore Dodd's enduring influence and contribution to painting.
