The exhibition will showcase a survey of work by Bailey Doogan (1941-2022), a celebrated artist, graphic designer and esteemed professor emerita at the University of Arizona School of Art.
In Bailey Doogan: Ways of Seeing, selections from each phase of the artist’s career will be displayed together for the first time, highlighting her artistic processes and evolution. Though certain themes recur throughout Doogan’s oeuvre, the breadth of her artistic practice is vast — ranging from surreal to hyperrealistic, whimsical to stark.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Illustration from the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Doogan began her career as a graphic designer. Among her most well-known designs is the Morton Salt Girl, an iconic symbol of the brand that remains mostly unchanged today — and one that the artist later reimagined in the large pastel drawing, Pour It On (1998). Doogan’s early work shows the influence of her design background, as well as the pressures she faced as a woman in a largely male-dominated industry.
In 1969, Doogan moved to Tucson to teach graphic design at the University of Arizona. She was promoted to Professor of Design, Painting and Drawing in 1982 after receiving her Master’s in Animated Film from the University of California, Los Angeles. Much of Doogan’s 1980s work features bright colors and cartoon-like figures as seen in If You Can Scream Loud Enough You Get Hopp’in Mad (1982).
At the end of the decade she began creating her signature works focused on the human body. Detailed and visceral, these drawings and paintings interrogate traditional artistic conventions of female beauty by centering the aging female body, a subject which has been largely avoided in Western art and popular culture.
In works like RIB (1988-1989) and Self-Exam (2003-2005), Doogan explained she was not aiming to depict “The Nude” or “The Figure.” Rather, “I deal with the real body,” she said. “Our bodies are diaries of our experience. Whatever happens to us is recorded there: wrinkles, scars, the way we stand. That specificity fascinates me. I think it’s beautiful.” Doogan often painted her own body at a monumental size and in great detail, drawing attention to aspects of the female form that society often shies away from.
Doogan retired from the university in 1999 and became a Professor Emerita of Painting and Drawing. Bailey remained a vital part of Tucson’s arts community and a driving force in the downtown arts scene until her death in 2022. Her way of seeing the world — and herself — encourages self-reflection and examination, with the body acting as a visual representation of the stories that make up who we are and the lives that we live.
This exhibition is curated by Violet Rose Arma, Curatorial Assistant, and Olivia Miller, Director, in close consultation with Moira Doogan — Bailey Doogan’s daughter.
