For over fifty years, Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927) has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Dodd’s small, intimately-scaled paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, nocturnal moonlit skies and views through interior windows. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results.
By painting her immediate circumstances, Dodd rejected the sources that others of her generation took as a given: Abtract Expressionism, mass media, and popular culture. Instead, she remained an advocate for realism, and was committed to painting the everyday visual world with a strict, geometric style inspired by the works of Mondrian and Charles Sheeler. There is nothing glitzy about the work, neither in its subject matter nor in her use of materials. She is often drawn to unpopulated or abandoned locations such as quarries, ponds, and woods, evoking a sense of loneliness. She does not celebrate excess, ownership, or leisure, nor does she condemn it. Whether or not she intends her refusals to be a comment on the work of those around her, her paintings embody an implicit critique of those who believe acquisitiveness, possession, and leisure are integral to the pursuit of happiness. When asked about her art career, Dodd disliked the word “practice” being used as a descriptor, commenting, “Doctors and Lawyers have a ‘practice,’ artists have a life.”
The critic Roberta Smith wrote in March 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world, the vagaries of nature and the specificities of old Maine houses: the way they cleave to the ground, or fill a picture frame, or shine, lights on or off, in the moonlight. She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.”
Lois Dodd studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Dodd’s work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017 she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch. From August 2025 to April 2026, The Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Hague, Netherlands held Dodd’s inaugural institutional European retrospective.