Dorothy Morang was the most consistent voice for non-objective painting in mid-twentieth-century New Mexico, a former concert pianist who carried the music-rooted abstraction of Kandinsky into the Santa Fe of the 1940s and built one of the most original modernist careers of her generation in the Southwest.
Dorothy Morang (November 24, 1906 – 1994) was an American modernist painter, born Dorothy Alden Clark in Maine and trained originally as a pianist at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met her future husband, the artist and critic Alfred Morang. Following her marriage in 1930 and Alfred's tuberculosis diagnosis, the couple moved in 1937 to Santa Fe, where the higher, drier climate had been recommended and where her art career took its definitive shape. She was largely self-taught as a painter but studied with Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, and from 1939 to 1941 she produced abstract easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project while also teaching piano and music appreciation for the WPA's Music Project.
She was associated with the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1942), the New Mexico circle of non-objective painters dedicated to a spiritually grounded abstraction inspired by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and the Theosophical tradition, and served as the group's press secretary. Her work was included in an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1940 and given solo shows at New York's Paneras Gallery in 1963 and 1965. From 1942 to 1963 she held a series of positions at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, eventually as Curator of Fine Arts, and in 1949 she helped found the Santa Fe Women Artists Exhibiting Group.