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Dorothy Ruddick (1925-2010) was born in Chicago in 1925, into a family of Hungarian and German Jewish ancestry, with some colonial American heritage as well. She attended Radcliffe College but left to study with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After graduating, she worked as a commercial artist for Mademoiselle and Flair magazines, and then in 1950 as lead textile designer Knoll, where colleagues included Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia. In 2013 the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum acquired twenty-two of her Knoll textile studies and a dress she has made from one of her prize-winning textile designs. Starting in 1951, Ruddick worked independently as a studio artist.
Ruddick participated in many group exhibitions during her lifetime, including The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her solo exhibitions included a retrospective at the Allentown Art Museum, as well as regular exhibitions at Fishbach Gallery, Graham Gallery and finally at the Richard York Gallery, all in New York City. Her work is included in many museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as numerous private collections.
Ruddick’s work progressed through a variety of media, from her first work designing textiles, to oil painting in the 1950s, to pen and India ink, to mixed media/fiber, to oil painting again, and finally to sculpture in (Sculpy) and bronze. A fascination with textiles and drapery weaves through much of her work. Ruddick moved fluidly between representation and abstraction; her interest in historic forms such as the Baroque was filtered through her modernist sensibility and training. In 2009 Ruddick collaborated on her only public project, the monumental living sculptures in the Urban Garden Room at the Bank of America Building in New York, with her daughter, landscape architect Margie Ruddick.
Throughout Dorothy Ruddick’s career, the influence of Albers endured in her tremendous discipline and rigor, her fascination with series and repetition, and her intense study of color within neutral palette. Her comfort with experimentation, and with exploring new media, generally reflects the training she received at Black Mountain in the years when it was transitioning from a Bauhaus-inflected European sensibility to a more experimental American one. Her work reflects both the practical and intellectual rigor imparted by Albers, while through that framework emerge forms and figures of life that take the work into a different and mysterious realm.
