Best Of Tucson®

Best Painting Exhibition

Bailey Doogan

Bailey Doogan scored a dazzling two-venue exhibition of her monumental paintings and drawings at both the art museum and the city's leading contemporary gallery. A longtime beloved professor of painting at the UA, now retired, Doogan's shows traveled through decades of her work, from an early lampoon of Minnie Mouse right up to a painting inspired by her contempt for the war in Iraq. In her mature work, Doogan reproduces the aging bodies of real women, subverting the art historical convention that the female nude must be young and unmarred. Beautifully rendered and lighted, her luminous women approach the sacred. A happy footnote to the shows: Doogan's large charcoal honoring a heroine of the Irish resistance was sold to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.