How Lois Dodd’s Paintings Frame Everyday Life

Born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927, Dodd went on to study art at The Cooper Union in NYC where she became an integral part of the Tenth Street Modernist group and a key founding member of the artist coop Tanager Gallery. Although she frequently exhibited her work from the early 1950s on, it was not until 2012 that she had her first major solo exhibition in the United States at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The country was slow to recognize the quiet power of her distilled imagery, all based on direct observation. 

Like many other female artists, Dodd balanced her art-making with motherhood and a teaching career at Brooklyn College and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She was married to sculptor Bill King. Her son Ely was born in 1952, the same year she began exhibiting her work. When Dodd divorced King, she faced the future with tenacity and a commitment to her life as an artist. In 1959, she joined with two other artist-mothers, printmaker Eleanor Magid and the late Louise Kruger, to buy a rowhouse together in the East Village, each taking a floor for themselves. They all had young children of the same age. Their story is the subject of a new film, Artists in Residence, which had its world premiere on November 14th, 2025 in New York as part of the DOC NYC film festival.

As the art world careened from its ever-shifting love affairs, moving from minimalism to abstract expressionism to pop art to photo realism and everything in between, Dodd remained true to her vision. Firmly entrenched in the real world, she ventures outdoors in all-weather, documenting fleeting, seasonal moments of light and atmosphere that are often framed by windows or doorways. Sometimes, she is inside looking out. Other times, she’s outside looking in. Two noteworthy paintings, Springtime Studio Interior and The Painted Room, are uncanny combinations of inside and outside, allowing viewers to experience the fullness of a time and place in nature, while not losing sight of the comfort of home. 

A series of works of a burning house are among the most unsettling images painted by Dodd. And, they are not pieces of the imagination, despite their surreal quality. She had permission to paint on-site when the local Maine fire department torched an abandoned house as a training exercise.

Over 80 works are included in Framing the Ephemeral, along with three paintings by Piet Mondrian, who Dodd states was an early influence. A new 240-page book, edited by project curator Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen and including essays and commentary by Lucy R. Lippard and Katy Hessel, has been published to accompany the exhibition. In conversation with the artist in conjunction with Natural Order, an earlier exhibition of her work at the Hall Art Foundation in 2022, she reminded me, “If painting isn’t hard, it’s probably not good.” Lois Dodd’s lifetime of hard work is beyond good. It is sublime.