Dorothy F. Foster

1903-1986 · New York City, USA

A retired Manhattan textile designer who spent her last decade filling photo albums with thousands of ballpoint drawings she called doodles. The world took 25 years to open the albums.

The life

Foster was born in Jersey City in 1903. After her father died young, her mother moved the family to Manhattan and supported them as a dressmaker. Foster studied art and interior design at Cooper Union and designed textiles for the clothier A. Sulka, writing poetry and painting in her own time; she tried and failed to get her work exhibited. In her final decade she drew constantly, signing every sheet and filling more than a dozen albums. A trunk of them sat in her sister’s house until the early 2010s, when her great-nephew found it. Her first showing came in 2015, and Fleisher/Ollman in Philadelphia gave her a solo exhibition in 2022.

The work

Ballpoint pen and coloured pencil on whatever paper passed through the house: magazine pages, newspapers, envelopes, paper plates, the backs of postcards. Dreamlike, sometimes cartoonish patterns and figures weave through the found printing, with recurring red-haired women and elfin figures in pointed hats, and bold black borders that give the pages a theatrical snap. The habits of a textile designer run through every repeat.

Why we love them

She heard no from the art world and simply kept drawing for fifty years. The albums were the exhibition, patiently waiting for its audience.

Go deeper

• Dorothy F. Foster at the Outsider Art Fair
• Fleisher/Ollman Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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