Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd’s paintings are rooted in a sustained observation of the places and objects that surround her daily life. Working primarily on a smaller scale and often completed in a single plein-air sitting, her paintings attend closely to the shifting effects of light, seasons and atmosphere across landscapes, interiors and domestic scenes. Returning repeatedly to familiar subjects – weathered houses, gardens, windows, moonlit skies, washing lines and woodlands – Dodd approaches painting as an act of continual looking, balancing direct representation with an underlying sense of structure and abstraction. Her restrained compositions distill the quiet strangeness of the observed world, transforming ordinary views into images of remarkable clarity and stillness.

Dodd was born in New Jersey in 1927 and studied at Cooper Union, New York, between 1945 and 1948. She has received numerous honours, including the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Distinguished Alumni Award from Cooper Union (2005); the Maine in America Award from the Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine (2015); the National Arts Club Medal of Honor (2018); and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Early grants include an Italian Government Study Grant (1959–60), and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant (1971). Dodd’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions including Lois Dodd: Catching the Light, a major retrospective organised by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, in 2012, which travelled to the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, as well as recent presentations at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine (2018); Modern Art, London (2019); and Hall Art Foundation, Vermont (2023). Group exhibitions include presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Academy Museum, New York; Grey Art Gallery, New York; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln; and the Nassau County Museum of Art, New York. Her work is held in major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Dodd currently lives and works between New York, Maine and the Delaware Water Gap.