Lois Dodd lives and works in Maine, Delaware Water Gap and New York City, USA. She studied textile design at Cooper Union in New York City, US (1945 – 1948). From 1971 to 1992, she taught at Brooklyn College and Showheagan Gallery.
In 1952, Lois Dodd founded Tanager Gallery with her former husband Bill King as well as the artists Angelo Ippolito, Charles Cajori and Fred Mitchel. Tanager Gallery became part of what is known as the 10th Street Galleries, which were co-operative galleries in New York’s East Village in the 1950s and 1960s. Dodd’s work was exhibited for the first time at Tanager Gallery in 1962.
Contrary to the dominant artistic trends of the time such as abstract expressionism, minimal art or pop art, Dodd developed her own specific visual language. Her oeuvre, whose motifs are mainly based on observations of landscapes, nudes and still lives, is neither impressionistic nor expressionistic, but verging on realism. Dodd is not a landscape painter in the classical sense, since she does not look at her subjects from a distance, but often from an intimate proximity, revealing complexity in apparent simplicity. Her paintings rarely depict entire scenes; instead, they are often cropped to show only one aspect of a landscape or a moment. For example, she precisely examines plants and flowers without lapsing into a botanical classification. Another recurring theme is the view from an inside to an outside, and the window as a screen of projection. Her works are never dazzling, pretentious or excessive. One possible interpretation of her work is that it contains a quiet critique of the relentless belief in progress, consumerism and possessiveness held by some of her contemporaries.
Lois Dodd has had numerous institutional solo exhibitions including at The Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont; Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion, Trenton, MJ; Ogunquit Museum of Modern Art, Ogunquit, Maine; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME. She has also been part of a variety of group exhibitions (selection): Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg Castle; Kanohah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; National Academy Museum and School, New York, NY; Visual Arts Center, Summit, New Jersey; Nassau County Museum of Arts, New York.