Bruce Museum is announcing the opening of their exhibition Lois Dodd: Natural Order, on April 2, 2023.
This exhibition marks the inaugural show by a single artist to be held in the Bruce Museum’s recently completed expansion, and together with the launch of eight other exhibitions will constitute the grand opening of the new Bruce.
Featuring nearly eighty paintings spanning the entirety of her artistic production, from her earliest work dating to the mid-1950s to examples produced as recently as 2021, this exhibition will be the largest survey of Dodd’s career to date.
On April 2, 2023, the Bruce Museum will open Lois Dodd: Natural Order, on view through May 28, 2023. This exhibition marks the inaugural show by a single artist to be held in the Bruce Museum’s recently completed expansion, and together with the launch of eight other exhibitions, will constitute the grand opening of the new Bruce.
Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation
(©Lois Dodd, image courtesy of Alexandre Gallery, New York)
The exhibition sponsor, Bank of America, is also Lead Partner of the new Bruce. Featuring nearly eighty paintings spanning the entirety of her artistic production, from her earliest work dating to the mid-1950s to examples produced as recently as 2021, this exhibition will be the largest survey of Dodd’s career to date. Taking its title from a work in the exhibition, Lois Dodd: Natural Order refers both to the artist’s enduring interest in nature and to the underlying geometry that structures her work.
Lois Dodd: Natural Order is organized by Margarita Karasoulas, Curator of Art, and presented in partnership with the Hall Art Foundation and Alexandre Gallery, New York. The show is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with an essay by Barry Schwabsky and texts transcribed from interviews conducted with the artist.
When asked about the exhibition, Curator Margarita Karasoulas said, “While Dodd has long been associated with the postwar avant-garde art scene in New York City, she has never been the subject of a major exhibition in the metropolitan area. We are thrilled about this opportunity to partner with the Hall Art Foundation and Alexandre Gallery to mount the largest survey of her work to date for the Bruce Museum’s reopening.” She continued, “Dodd’s art deepens our tradition of collecting and exhibiting plein-air landscape painting, including the American Impressionists represented in our collection who painted outdoors directly from nature. Lois Dodd: Natural Order offers a timely look at the career of this pioneering woman artist, focusing on her contributions to histories of realism and abstraction in the twentieth century.”
A longtime partner of the Bruce Museum and supporter of the arts and cultural institutions throughout Connecticut, Bank of America is Lead Partner of the new Bruce. From the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, which provides grants for the preservation and conservation of cultural treasures, to the bank’s signature Museums on Us® program which offers free admission to cultural institutions across the country each month, Bank of America believes in the power of the arts to help enrich local communities and create greater cultural understanding.
“Sharing and learning from perspectives other than our own through access to cultural institutions and museums is crucial for building cultural understanding and a better community,” said Bill Tommins, President, Bank of America Southern Connecticut. “We look forward not only to the new Bruce’s inaugural exhibition but to the legacy the new Bruce will continue to build, positively impacting our Connecticut community, and beyond.”
To commemorate this monumental exhibition, on Monday, April 17th , 2023, at 6:00 p.m. the Bruce Museum will host an in-person artist lecture in the brand-new Gale and Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., and Pamela and Robert Goergen Auditorium.
During this public program, Lois Dodd, in conversation with Faye Hirsch (Associate Professor & MFA Chair at the School of Art + Design in Purchase College, SUNY) will discuss the exhibition. An exhibition celebration for Bruce Museum members will be held on Tuesday, April 18th.
About Lois Dodd For nearly eight decades, Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927) has produced a compelling body of work grounded in direct observation of her immediate surroundings. Working from her homes and studios on New York’s Lower East Side; the Delaware Water Gap, New Jersey; and from her summer residence in Midcoast Maine, Dodd continually draws inspiration from everyday life. Her subjects include urban views, verdant landscapes, detailed close-ups of flowers and gardens, nocturnal skies, dense woods, windows, clotheslines, and weather-worn clapboard barns. Painted outdoors en plein air, Dodd’s canvases are usually completed in one sitting, and reflect her prolonged engagement with seriality. Indeed, Dodd returns to familiar subjects repeatedly over the course of years or decades, working with urgency to capture subtle changes in light, weather, and atmosphere at different seasons or times of day.
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Dodd enrolled at The Cooper Union in the late 1940s, where she studied art and textile design. In 1952 she served as one of five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Although she is often associated with the deadpan realism of her contemporaries Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver, Dodd forged her own distinctive path during an era otherwise dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Her pictures reflect an acutely observational approach to painting, often oscillating between representation and abstraction.
In compositions distilled to their very essence, Dodd offers an empirical, yet deeply personal, view of the world that reflects the interiority of her artistic vision. As the artist herself has noted, “Painters are lucky that they see things—not everyone has this ability. I can see things, and that’s where it starts.”
Located in Bruce Park overlooking Greenwich Harbor, the Bruce Museum is a community-based, world-class institution that offers a changing array of exhibitions and educational programs to promote the understanding and appreciation of art and science.
Bruce Museum is located at One Museum Drive,Greenwich, CT 06830