ArtCenter Receives $77,000 Grant for First Survey of California Post-Surrealist Dorr Bothwell

ArtCenter College of Design has received a $77,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to mount the first full survey of work by Dorr Bothwell, a California-born artist who shaped West Coast modernism alongside the founders of Post-Surrealism but has remained largely absent from major museum retrospectives.

The exhibition, “Dorr Bothwell: In Her Mind’s Eye,” opens October 15, 2026 at ArtCenter’s Williamson Gallery and will travel to Vassar College the following summer. It represents nearly two decades of research by curators Julie Joyce, who directs ArtCenter Galleries, and Mary-Kay Lombino of Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Bothwell (1902–2000) joined the post-surrealist circle around Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg in Los Angeles in 1934, working alongside the artists who launched the first organized American response to European Surrealism. She became known for her innovative use of serigraphy as a fine art medium and spent decades teaching at institutions including the California School of Fine Arts and the Mendocino Art Center.

Yet despite work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Bothwell has not received a comprehensive survey exhibition.

“We are grateful for the Terra Foundation’s generous support for this important exhibition,” said Joyce, ArtCenter’s vice president of exhibitions. “This grant enables us to broaden the conversation and raise awareness of Dorr Bothwell’s contributions to the development of American art, and to share her work with a wider audience.”

The Terra Foundation, which has offices in Chicago and Paris, supports projects that expand narratives of American art. Its exhibition grants typically range from $25,000 to $200,000. The Bothwell grant will fund exhibition development, presentation, and related scholarly work.

The exhibition will feature paintings, works on paper, and ceramics spanning the 1930s through the 1980s. It will highlight Bothwell’s early narrative and dreamlike paintings alongside her later abstract work, including a series of screen prints inspired by the Western landscape, according to ArtCenter.

Joyce, who was raised in Altadena and joined ArtCenter in 2019 after more than a decade as contemporary art curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, brings deep roots in the region to the project. Lombino, who received a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2006 and an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2009, oversees contemporary art and photography at Vassar’s Loeb, which holds more than 22,000 works.

The Williamson Gallery is located at 1700 Lida Street on ArtCenter’s Hillside Campus and is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission information has not been announced.