Dotty Attie (b. 1938, Pennsauken, NJ) is an American painter and printmaker. She has been exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide since the 1970s. Attie’s work in the 1960s received some attention, but gained far more recognition after her involvement in A.I.R. Gallery. In 1971, she was one of the co-founders of A.I.R., a non-profit cooperative gallery and one of the first to exclusively feature the work of women artists.
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 Old Master 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, Gustave Courbet, Thomas Eakins, 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. 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 art education includes a B.F.A. degree in 1959 from the Philadelphia College of Art; a Beckmann Fellowship in 1960 at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York; and the Art Students League, New York in 1967. She received a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1976-1977 from the New York State Council on the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1976-1977 and 1983-1984. 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) formed in 2013. Attie currently resides in New York City.
