Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle

Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle (1901–2002) was an American modernist artist, university professor, and art historian.

Biography Toni LaSelle was born in 1901 in the prosperous farming community of Beatrice, Nebraska. She was her "family's seventh child, the first one born in the twentieth century." LaSelle earned a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1923 and an MA in art history from the University of Chicago in 1926. Following her graduate studies, LaSelle traveled abroad throughout Europe before pursuing further postgraduate studies at the San Francisco School of Design and the Chicago Bauhaus. She studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Art: New York City in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

LaSelle was an instructor at the State Teachers College in Terre Haute, Indiana, from 1925 to 1927. From 1926 to 1927, She was the Acting Head of the Art Department at Stevens College, in Columbia, Missouri. LaSelle taught at Texas Woman's University (TWU) from 1928 to 1972, where she was responsible for developing the art history program. During the summers of 1929 and 1930, she was an art instructor at University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Dallas; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA).

LaSelle died in Denton, Texas, in 2002 at the age of 100. It was during this time that LaSelle wrote her thesis on the indigenous masks of New Guinea in the Field Museum collection and their influence on the development of Cubism in Paris. In 2021 the Inman Gallery in Houston hosted Toni LaSelle: A State of Becoming.

A list of all LaSelle’s solo and group exhibitions can be found on the Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Foundation website.

Exhibitions One of Toni LaSelle’s most notable solo exhibitions was in 1950, at the Pinacotheca (Rose Fried Gallery) in New York. Although the exhibition was reviewed more favorably for a woman artist than any other at its time at the Rose Fried Gallery, LaSelle never gained the notoriety of her male counterparts. In 1959 the Fort Worth Art Center held a retrospective of LaSelle's work. In 2018, LaSelle was featured in the Frieze Masters Spotlight of the Frieze Art Fair in London, with curator Carrie Scott stating, "Overlooked during her own lifetime by art historical cannons mostly because of her gender, LaSelle's work is a stellar example of the vitality of non-objective painting at midcentury". In 2021, the Inman Gallery in Houston hosted Toni LaSelle: A State of Becoming. JC Gallery in London ran a show of her work, Toni LaSelle - Twenty One Trees, in 2025.

A comprehensive list of LaSelle’s solo and group exhibitions can be found on the Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Foundation website.

Notable Solo Exhibitions

Dorothy LaSelle: Drawings, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, March 14 – April 4, 1948

Toni LaSelle: Paintings and Drawings, Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University), Denton, TX, January 13 – February 4, 1952

Selected Works – Various Media, Art Building Galleries, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX, February 5 – 26, 1961

Notable Group Exhibitions

Art of the Americas: Pre-Columbian and Contemporary, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, June 12 - October 31, 1937

Fourth Annual Texas Print Exhibition, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, November 26, 1944 – January 2, 1945

2nd Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, March 6 – 27, 1949