Dorothy Fratt was born in Washington, D.C. in 1923 and was the daughter of a photographer-journalist who worked for the Washington Post.  Fratt received her first prize in art at the age of fifteen from the Corcoran School of Art and the Phillips Memorial Gallery Art School.  Fratt also won multiple scholarships to Mount Vernon College, the Corcoran School of Art, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C.  Fratt studied painting with Nikolai Cikovsky and Karl Knaths.  Fratt held her first solo exhibition in 1946 at the Washington, D.C. City Library.  Fratt taught at Mount Vernon College, Washington, D.C. (1946-1951).  Dorothy Fratt was way ahead of her time and would reject labels as either a Color Field artist or a Hard-edge painter, and she would even dismiss her association with the Washington Color School.  Fratt was an independent artist, strong woman and a pioneer who left Washington D.C. and moved West to Arizona in 1958.

Dorothy Fratt’s work has been exhibited and shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Tucson Art Center, Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and Roswell Museum of Art. Fratt uses color, perception and shapes as an expressive tool, to create a unique color phenomena.  Fratt is indeed a genius colorist in the purist sense.  Fratt was the winner of the Arizona Governor’s Artist of the Year Award in 2000; Dorothy Fratt paints in a non-objective style related to Abstract Expressionism. Fratt brilliantly arranges forms and color on canvas. Her work is in many private, public, and corporate permanent collections, including Phoenix Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Northern Arizona, Arizona State University, Palm Springs Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery, Museum Art Plus, Paderborn, Burlington Northern, IBM, General Electric and many others.