Bailey Doogan: Ways of Seeing

This exhibition showcases a survey of work by Bailey Doogan (1941-2022)—a celebrated artist, graphic designer and esteemed professor emerita at the University of Arizona.

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.

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.