Lois Dodd
Second Street Paintings
March 31 – May 1, 2010

For over fifty years Lois Dodd has maintained a loft studio on Second Street near the Bowery. In the late 1960s she turned her eyes out a West window, over a nineteenth century cemetery to the buildings and skyline beyond, and began to paint the view. “Second Street Paintings” will present this series of ten paintings from 1967 – 1970 that range in size from 8 x 10 to 45 x 30 inches. Also included will be three recent paintings depicting the same view from 2006 –2009.

On this work the critic and artist John Goodrich writes: “In this selection of paintings of views from her lower Manhattan home, the artist uncovers the inner character of every element in its tell-tale geometry and hue. How do the broad planes of a sprawling brick building regard the day? As crisp, terracotta- colored facets, starkly absorbent under midday sun, in one painting; in another, as rich, close-toned hues, thick with moisture after a snowfall; elsewhere, as a shadowy, distanced plane, on a day so foggy that only a foreground tree strikes a dark note.”

Lois Dodd (b. 1927) studied at The Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, the first artist run cooperative gallery in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the National Academy of Design. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions. This show marks her seventh at the gallery. In May 2012 her work will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.