Dorathy Bruce (1904-1989), also known as Dorathy Bruce Farr, was a Portland painter and batik artist who spent a portion of her career in New York, where she and her husband, the painter Fred Farr, were associated with the Abstract Expressionist group which included Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Bruce created murals in New York and Florida and had shows from New Hampshire to New Orleans. Bruce and her husband, Farr, won a grant in the 1940s to work on a mural in the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. In addition to murals, Bruce worked in lithography, woodblock, pottery and mosaics.
Back in Portland, Dorathy Bruce had shows at the Fountain Gallery and Sally Judd Gallery from the 1960s to the early 1980s before becoming ill and unable to work. She died on August 21, 1989.
From the guide to the The Dorathy Bruce Farr papers, 1965-1989, (Willamette University University Archives and Special Collections)
