Lamar Dodd's remarkably diverse career in art and art education originated and culminated in Georgia.  Born and raised in the state, Dodd received initial art instruction at LaGrange College as a youngster aged 12, before relocating many years later to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with notable instructors such as George Luks, Boardman Robinson, and John Steuart Curry.

Dodd returned to the South in 1937, becoming a faculty member in the art department at the University of Georgia.  He became chair of the art department the next year, a position he maintained until 1973.

Under Dodd's vision, the art department flourished.  The art faculty and students expanded far beyond the paltry numbers Dodd faced in the 1930s.  His interests in painting and arts advocacy delivered him to foreign corners of the world and introduced him to environments beyond the South. 

As a professional artist, Dodd's career spans many decades, from early studies in the 1920s and 1930s to the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. "[Dodd]…has been the eyewitness and recorder of this critical phase in our history." (1) As a result, Dodd's stylistic tendencies naturally evolved as he experimented with reigning techniques.  His work often synthesized disparate movements in American art.

Dodd's challenge lay in adhering to one style or movement.  He believed that he would always remain a student.  In the artist's own words, "Painting, for me, is a constant and never-ending quest for artistic objectivity based indirectly and directly upon my personal observations and reactions to the visual world; but of even more importance is a search for, and an awareness of, the inner structures of matter rather than the surface appearance of things." (2)

Sources include:

1. Hereward Lester Cooke, Lamar Dodd (New York: Frank Rehn Gallery, 1973), exhibition publication April 16 - May 5, 1973.  In addition, a more comprehensive survey of Dodd's career and art is found in William U. Eiland, The Truth in Things: the Life and Career of Lamar Dodd (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

2. Lamar Dodd, (New York: Grand Central Moderns, 1965), exhibition publication, November 6-27, 1965. staff, Columbus Museum

Biography from The Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia