Dorothea Rockburne was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and attended the Montreal Museum School and École des Beaux Arts de Montreal, where she learned the classical basics of art making. In 1950, she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. While there, she studied painting with Esteban Vincente, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline; she studied dance with Merce Cunningham; music with John Cage; and photography with Hazel Freida Larsen. Her fellow students were Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.
At Black Mountain College, Max Dehn, renowned mathematician, helped create a foundation for Rockburne’s future understanding of art by introducing her to the structures of higher mathematics via set theory, linear algebra, and topology. She later received a doctorate in mathematics from Bowdoin College. In 1954, she moved to New York, where she currently resides.
Dorothea’s work is featured in the collections of MoMA, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany; Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; among many others international and domestic, as well as countless private collections.
Dorothea was commissioned by the Foundation of Art and Preservation in Embassies in 2007, and in 2013, she was highlighted in a solo Exhibition, Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself, at MoMA, New York. In May 2018, Dia Art Foundation opened a long-term five-room installation of her large-scale works from the ‘70s and ‘80s at Dia:Beacon, New York. Her drawings from the Michael and Juliet Rubenstein collection are featured in an exhibition at the Met Breuer from January 29–March 29, 2020, titled From Géricault to Rockburne: Selections from the Michael and Juliet Rubenstein Gift.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), a National Endowment for the Arts (1974), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy (2009), honors from the International Print Center (2018), an induction into American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and was on the board of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she presently serves on their finance committee.