Dorothy Fratt

Dorothy Fratt was published in conjunction with the first major US museum exhibition on the prolific, yet underrecognized, American painter Dorothy Fratt (1923–2017). Born in Washington, DC, and associated with the Washington Color School in the early 1950s, Fratt moved to Arizona in 1958 and would go on to forge her own style of abstraction more closely tied to the Southwest United States. Although Fratt’s paintings are often classified as color field and Abstract Expressionist, her use of color and expression of her surroundings evolved into a prolific body of work that idiosyncratically emotes landscape, atmosphere, gesture, and mood on her own terms. Spanning five decades of the artist’s oeuvre, Dorothy Fratt includes a selection of foundational early works alongside numerous paintings that exemplify Fratt’s vibrant and distinct style of abstraction. The book also features an extended biography, ephemera from Fratt’s life, and a conversation with contemporary artists Teresa Baker, Caroline Kent, and Rebecca Ward.

Dorothy Fratt (1923–2017) had solo exhibitions at the Tucson Art Center (1964), Phoenix Art Museum (1964), and Scottsdale Center for the Arts (1980). Her work was shown in group exhibitions at US institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1948, 1964); Roswell Museum of Art, NM (1961); and California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA (1965). Posthumously, her work was introduced to a European audience in a group exhibition at Museum Art Plus in Donaueschingen, Germany (2018-19), followed by a solo exhibition at Stadtische Galerie in der Reithalle, Paderborn, Germany (2020). Her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Palm Springs Art Museum, California; Museum Art Plus and Stadtische Galerie in der Reithalle, both in Germany; Arizona State University Art Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and Tucson Museum of Art, all in Arizona.