Dotty Attie (born 1938,
Pennsauken,
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
) is an acclaimed feminist painter, and the co-founder of the first all-female cooperative art gallery in America,
A.I.R. Gallery.
Her work has been widely exhibited and is in many major museum collections, including the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery in London.
She also has the rare distinction of having an all-female punk rock band named after her. Attie currently resides in New York, New York.
Education and early work
Attie discovered her interest in art at an early age, as she found that she was interested in drawing. She was heavily influenced by her father, who brought her to art classes in
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
and provided her with art books, most notably ones with illustrations of works by
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( , ; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassicism, Neoclassical Painting, painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic ...
.
["The First Act: An Archaeological Adventure from J. and Armand Tour the World," ''Wadsworth Atheneum'', January 1, 1980.] Although her favorite living artist happens to be
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary Germa ...
.
Attie continued her education at the
Philadelphia College of Art
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since 1 ...
, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959.
While in college, Attie was primarily an
Abstract Expressionist
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
painter, but often realistically recreated the likeness of photographs on her canvases.
Following her time at the Philadelphia College of Art, Attie continued her education through fellowships at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School in 1960, and the
Art Students League
The Art Students League of New York is an art school at American Fine Arts Society, 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists ...
in 1967.
Feminism and A.I.R. Gallery
Attie's work in the 1960s received some attention, but gained far more recognition after her involvement in
A.I.R. Gallery. In 1972, she co-founded A.I.R., a non-profit cooperative gallery and one of the first to exclusively feature the work of women artists.
As an early artist-member, Attie helped the group to choose a gallery space and recruit members.
Attie had her first solo show at the gallery in 1972.
[ Shortly after, she felt the freedom to rediscover her early passion for drawing.][ Later, she was an integral part of the gallery's establishment of an international presence, and helped to secure shows in ]Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
, Israel
Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
, and Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
.[
While still a member of A.I.R., Attie began to solidify her personal style,][ which remained fairly consistent throughout her career;][ she typically deconstructed existing images—such as paintings][ and early 20th Century black-and-white photographs—and her works often included text to create a narrative.][ Therefore, some of her works contain small pictures that were copied from other, sometimes famous, works by ]Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio (, , ; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of hi ...
, Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( , , ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and t ...
, Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
For the length ...
, and Ingres.[ Some of these pictures have been taken from the backgrounds of earlier works, bringing new perspectives to features which may have been formerly overshadowed. This produces a quality of differing scale, paired with short segments of text, which creates a cinematic quality throughout.][ The text and pictures are related, but do not contribute to a clear narrative, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks left by the artist.][ Furthermore, her multi-panel paintings explore the depictions of the body in the history of art and critique the gender bias in the art world.][ By reanalyzing famous paintings, she emphasizes the hidden undertones within these works that degrade women previously unnoticed due to the male gaze with which they were originally painted. Because Attie, at times, has meticulously repainted well-known works but presented them in fragments or with other modifications, her work has addressed the concepts of originality and reproduction.]
Attie's work is often characterized by her identification with feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
. She has explained, that feminism "means no barriers between what a woman chooses to do, and what is acceptable by societal and familial standards."[ These ideals are present in her work, which often contains manipulated images of women that accentuate their vulnerability,][ often featuring lewd acts of a sexual nature.
]
Awards and recognition
Dotty Attie received multiple grants for her artwork, one being the Creative Artist Public Service Grant in 1976-77 and another being the National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
Grant, which she won in 1976-77 and 1983–84.
Later career
Her most recent exhibitions have been at the P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
. ''What Would Mother Say'' (2009) featured children engaging in actions which, while innocent, may be construed by adults as provocative or shameful; each work is accompanied by two panels of text.[Wilson, Aimee. "Dotty Attie, Behind the Mask." ''Art in America'' (November 18, 2013).] More recently, ''The Lone Ranger'' (2013) served as a follow up to ''What Would Mother Say'' and included a photo of a boy kissing a horse. According to Attie, that little boy grew up to be the Lone Ranger
The Lone Ranger is a fictional masked former Texas Ranger who fought outlaws in the American Old West with his Native American friend Tonto. The character has been called an enduring icon of American culture.
He first appeared in 1933 in ...
.[ Attie expresses that “All of my (her) work is about our hidden selves, the part of us we don’t want to share with others”, and this was her inspiration for “The Lone Ranger”. The overarching idea of the show is that "If a little boy does something, he will grow up to be a hero. But the little girls, doing the same thing, they all become whores."][ In 2013 she was working on a series of painting called the “Worst Case Scenarios”.
Attie's paintings are in the collections of ]The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of th ...
, Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
, the Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
, the National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director o ...
in London, and many others.
In addition to numerous honors in the art world, such as her induction into the National Academy in 2013, Attie has the unusual distinction of having a punk rock band named after her; the female-led indie quartet Dottie Attie, based in Portland, Oregon
Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...
, formed in 2013. Attie has been photographed wearing the band's t-shirts.
Personal life
Attie's first life partner was David Attie, a prominent American commercial and fine art photographer with whom she had two sons, the widely-published mathematician Oliver Attie and TV writer Eli Attie
Eli Attie is an Emmy-winning writer, producer, and former White House staff member. He served as Vice President Al Gore's chief White House and campaign speechwriter through Gore's concession of the 2000 presidential election, which Attie and Gor ...
. Her current partner is David Olan, a classical composer.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Attie, Dotty
1938 births
Living people
People from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey
American women painters
Feminist artists
University of the Arts (Philadelphia) alumni
20th-century American painters
American women printmakers
20th-century American printmakers
21st-century American painters
21st-century American printmakers
20th-century American women photographers
20th-century American photographers
21st-century American women photographers
21st-century American photographers
Painters from New Jersey
Photographers from New Jersey