Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd
Born	1927 Montclair, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Cooper Union
Known for	Painting

Lois Dodd (born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1927) is an American painter.

Lois Dodd was educated at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1945–48. She was the only woman founder of the Tanager Gallery, which was integral to the Tenth Street-avant-garde scene of the 1950s where artists began running their own coop galleries. She exhibited at Tanager Gallery from 1952-1962. From 1969-1976, she exhibited at the Green Mountain Gallery. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she served on the Board beginning in 1980 and is now Governor Emerita. She is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and of the National Academy of Design. She currently lives in New York and works in Maine.

In a 2011 interview, Dodd said of the original Tanager gallery: "In 1952...I was married to Bill King and we had an apartment on 29th Street. Ely was born in ’52 at just about the same time we opened the gallery. Angelo Ippolito, Charles Cajori, Fred Mitchell, King, and myself were the original group. Bill King and I were in Italy on his Fulbright where we met Angelo and Fred there on the G.I. Bill. Cajori had been at Skowhegan with Bill. We had reunited in New York after our return from Italy...It was on 4th Street in this tiny space that had been a barbershop. The elevated subway was still running up and down the Bowery. There was a bar across the street and a lot of Bowery guys were around the corner, completely different than it is now."

As part of the wave of New York modernists to explore the coast of Maine just after the end of the second world war, Dodd helped to change the face of painting in the state. Along with Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver, Dodd began spending her summers in the Mid-Coast region surrounding Penobscot Bay. Attracted by inexpensive but rambling old farmhouses, verdant fields, and the bright sunshine of a summer's day, these artists sought both companionship and an escape from the demands of city life. The break from the city and its urbane art circles allowed them the freedom to explore new modes of painting-the landscape and the figure-that were anathema in the era of Abstract Expressionism.

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