About

Dorothy Fratt

by Jules & Nancy Heller

Dorothy Fratt - Cooper (August 10, 1923 - July 7, 2017) was an American artist.

Born in Washington, D.C., Dorothy Fratt is the daughter of a photographer-­journalist who worked for the Washington Post. Fratt won multiple scholarships to Mount Vernon College, the Corcoran School of Art, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery Art School-all in Washington, D.C.  She studied painting with Nikolai Cikovsky and Karl Knaths. 

Fratt held her first solo exhibition in 1946 at the Washington, D.C., City Library and since then has shown her work in many other solo shows, including the Tucson Art Center (1964), the Phoenix Art Museum (1964), Yares Gallery, Scottsdale (1965, 1966, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989), and a major retrospective exhibition, "Dorothy Fratt: 1970-1980," Scottsdale Center for the Arts (1980)-all in Arizona; Thomas Babeor Gallery, La Jolla, California (1985); and others.  Her work has been invited to many group exhibitions, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1948, 1964); the Roswell Museum of Art, New Mexico (1961); California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1965); "Gottlieb's Contemporaries," Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona (1979); "4 Women," Carson­-Sapiro Gallery, Denver, Colorado (1981); Wade Gallery, Los Angeles, California (1989); and others. 

Fratt taught at Mount Vernon College, Washington, D.C. (1946-1951) and offered private instruction in painting and color theory after settling in Phoenix, Arizona (1958-1972). Winner of several honors and awards for her work, she won her first prize at the age of fifteen in a student show at the Corcoran School of Art.  Despite some of the titles of her huge acrylic paintings which, in themselves, suggest representational works to certain viewers, Fratt uses color as an expressive tool, uniquely, personally, from deep within her being, to create and explore ever-new color phenomena.  She is indeed a colorist in the purist sense of the word.  Her work is in many private, public, and corporate permanent collections, including the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff; Arizona State University, Tempe; Burlington Northern, Seattle, Washington; IBM; General Electric; and many others. 

Bibliography 

• Cone, Claribel. "Dorothy Fratt at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts." Artspace (June 1980): 48-49. 

• Dorothy Fratt: Paintings 1970-1980. A Catalog. Scottsdale Center for the Arts, 1980. 

• Holusha, Rosemary. "Dorothy Fratt." Art Voices South (September-October 1979): 47. 

Excerpted from Jules & Nancy Heller's book, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary | Taylor & Francis; First Edition edition (March 1, 1995).

Photograph of Dorothy by José Bermudez.