Dodd exhibit marks Greenwich’s Bruce Museum reopening
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich recently completed an expansion, and to celebrate its opening, the museum will hold its inaugural show by a single artist in the space, with the exhibit, “Lois Dodd: Natural Order.”
On display from April 2 through May 28, the exhibit is one of eight that constitutes the grand opening of the “new” Bruce Museum.
“The largest survey of Dodd’s career to date, ‘Lois Dodd: Natural Order’ is organized thematically and focuses on the subject matter that preoccupied Dodd across her career, including pastoral landscapes, woods, flowers, nudes, winterscapes, nocturnes, urban views and, of course, the window pictures for which she is most famous,” said Margarita Karasoulas, curator of art at the Bruce Museum.
Originally from Montclair, N.J., Dodd enrolled at The Cooper Union in the late ‘40s, to study 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. Dodd is known for engaging with traditions of realism and abstraction in the 20th century — a blending that makes her work so unique and consistently paints from life and from direct observation.
In Karasoulas’ opinion, Dodd’s paintings reward close looking, and she believes visitors will come away with a better understanding of the deeply personal nature of Dodd’s artistic vision.
“They reveal the extraordinary
in the ordinary and, in many ways, evoke the passage of time,” Karasoulas said. “For some visitors, the exhibition will provide an introduction to Dodd’s work, and for those more familiar with Dodd’s career, it will provide a unique opportunity to see the artist’s early and most recent work in dialogue.”
“Lois Dodd: Natural Order” is an expanded version of a recent show at the Hall Art Foundation.
The Bruce Museum’s exhibition is much larger, and it includes institutional loans from the Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, and Colby College Museum of Art in Maine. It also includes work from private collections that show the great range and breadth of Dodd’s art.
In all, the show will include nearly 80 paintings spanning the entirety of Dodd’s artistic production, from her earliest work dating
to the mid-1950s to examples produced as recently as 2021. The show is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with an essay by Barry Schwabsky and texts transcribed from interviews conducted with the artist.
Choosing to feature Dodd’s work was an easy one for the museum to make.
“Dodd’s enduring interest in nature and commitment to painting outdoors en plein air is very
much in keeping with the Bruce Museum’s own collection and institutional origins, which felt appropriate for our reopening,” Karasoulas said. “We also felt this exhibition was timely — and long overdue — for the artist, who spent much of her career living and working in New York’s Lower East Side.”
The Bruce Museum’s public program on April 17 at 6 p.m., will provide a unique opportunity to see Dodd in dialogue with Faye Hirsch, associate professor and MFA chair at the School of Art + Design in Purchase College, for an in-depth conversation about the exhibition and the artist’s career.
For more details about the talk or the exhibit, www.brucemuseum.org.