This first career museum retrospective features paintings that define the places and subjects that have mattered most in the nearly sixty-year, career of this American plein-air painter. The exhibition includes images of the places that have mattered most to Dodd: the cityscapes of New York City’s Lower East Side and the woods and gardens of mid-coastal Maine. The exhibition’s 51 works range in date from 1955’s Pasture to 2010’s self-portrait Shadow with Easel.

The exhibition is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Barbara O'Brien, the Museum’s chief curator. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition with essays by O'Brien; John Yau, poet, curator and professor at Rutgers University; and Alison Ferris, curator at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. After showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition travels to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where it will be on view in early 2013.

Above: Lois Dodd, Self-Portrait in Green Window, 1971; oil on linen, 53.5 in. x 36 in.; Collection of Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Museum purchase with support from the Contemporary Art Fund, 2000.1

Inspired by the best-selling book The Map as Art, this exhibition presents large-scale artworks that explore issues of mapping—whether conceptually or quite literally—while also examining the personal gesture involved in works of overwhelming size. The exhibition is co-curated by Kemper Museum Chief Curator Barbara O'Brien and Katharine Harmon, author of The Map as Art (published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

Joyce Kozloff, Targets, 2000; acrylic on canvas with wood frame, 108 inches diameter; Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York; photo: Jon and Anne Abbott, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York