Doris Chase papers, 1937-2017

Doris Chase was born in Seattle, Washington in 1923. She studied architecture at the University of Washington between 1941 and 1943. In 1950, after the birth of her two children and after her husband was paralyzed by polio, she began to teach painting as a way of combating the overwhelming difficulties confronting her. Working in Seattle through the fifties and the sixties, she established herself as a recognized painter. By 1962, at a time when the art world in the United States was almost exclusively male, she had her first New York City gallery show. During the sixties she turned to sculpture. In order to create large-scale wood pieces, she found it necessary to work collaboratively with a wide range of skilled craftsmen. This experience proved essential when, in the late sixties, she began collaborating with the dancer Mary Staton to create dance sculpture - sculpture designed for interaction with dancers in performance. It was during these collaborations that Chase began to use film, first as a means of documentation and eventually as an integral artistic element.

Through the seventies, Chase created a number of dance/sculpture films, placing her at the front of contemporary avant-garde movements. After coming to New York, she was encouraged by the video artist Nam June Paik to explore video art. Her works in this medium have been shown widely in festivals, screenings, and exhibits worldwide, and have been collected by museum, libraries, and archives. During the seventies Chase also produced a number of videos for children including Sculpture for Children, The Emperor's New Clothes, and How Do You Feel? that explore themes of self-esteem, body awareness, and movement. She also began to use the medium of video to explore the subject of women from a feminist point of view in documentaries such as Lies, Masks, Windows, Skyfish, Electra Tries to Speak, Travels in the Combat Zone, and Thulani, which comprise the "Concept Series". By the mid-eighties, Chase achieved a breakthrough into mainstream television with the "By Herself" series, in which she introduced the subject matter of older women in society to a popular audience. Chase also produced and directed works in the series, such as Table for One, Dear Papa, A Dancer, Glass Curtain, and Sophie. She died in Seattle in December 2008.