DOTTY ATTIE

Early Years

Attie was born in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 1938. Encouraged by her father, she began drawing at an early age and attended art classes in Philadelphia. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, earning her BFA in 1959, and continued her education at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School (Beckmann Fellowship, 1960) and the Art Students League in New York (1967). Attie has lived and worked in New York City for most of her career, becoming a central figure in the city’s feminist and contemporary art scenes.

Dotty Attie Artworks

Attie’s contemporary art practice is defined by her serial, small-scale paintings and drawings, which reimagine and fragment images from Old Master paintings, vintage photographs, and film stills. She pairs these precise, black-and-white (with touches of flesh) panels with original text, creating open-ended narratives that challenge traditional interpretations and highlight issues of gender, sexuality, and representation.

Early Practice and A.I.R. Gallery

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Attie was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, exhibiting graphite drawings that already showed her interest in narrative and appropriation. Her early works often referenced art historical images, deconstructing canonical paintings to expose hidden power dynamics.

Multi-Panel Narratives and Appropriation

By the 1980s, Attie had developed her signature format: series of 6 x 6-inch canvases or panels, each meticulously painted and arranged in grids or lines, interspersed with short text fragments. Works such as Mother’s Kisses (1982) and Vermeer’s Wife (1998) reinterpret classical nudes and portraits, foregrounding the vulnerability and agency of women depicted by male artists. Her Lone Ranger series (2013) interrogates American mythmaking and masculinity through cinematic sequencing and wry commentary.

Recent Work and Ongoing Influence

Attie’s art continues to evolve, incorporating imagery from popular culture and contemporary media while maintaining her commitment to questioning societal conventions. Her 2023 survey, What Surprised Them Most, at PPOW Gallery, highlighted nearly five decades of work dedicated to ‘revealing the parts of ourselves that we don’t really share with anybody else’.

Awards and Accolades

• Beckmann Fellowship, Brooklyn Museum of Art School (1960)
• Creative Artists Public Service grant, New York State Council (1976)
• National Endowment for the Arts grants (1976, 1983)
• Elected to the National Academy of Design (2013).

Exhibitions

Dotty Attie has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Solo Exhibitions

• What Surprised Them Most, PPOW Gallery, New York (2023)
• Sometimes a Traveler/There Lived in Egypt, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford (2013)
• Pierre and Lady Holland: A Suite of Drawings, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton (1999)
• Paintings and Drawings, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh (1989)
• The New Museum, New York (1983)
• Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (1980)
• Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1979)
• A.I.R. Gallery, New York (1980)

Group Exhibitions

• The Grid and the Curve, JTT, New York
• Rage, Resist, Rise!, Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa
• This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
• Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York
• Grey Art Museum, New York University
• Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Dotty Attie FAQs

Ocula | 2025