Bailey Doogan was born Margaret Mary Bailey in WWII-era Philadelphia.

Her father was the milkman, and that’s not a euphemism, he actually delivered milk to stoops, what a concept. Her modest upbringing endowed her with a working class woman approach to art (lots of overlap with the other kind of #WCW) like her fellow Moore College of Art Alumnus Alice Neel. That is to say: no messing around.

Doogan excelled as an illustrator after college. She won a bunch of design awards and worked on such iconic logos as the Morton Salt girl, Mortie. She suffered through a board meeting full of 60-something men in black suits telling her how “Mortie” was too short-legged, Jewish, teenaged, or lesbian while Doogan, in her own words, “fought a simultaneous need to laugh and throw up.” Then she found out that her male inferiors were making more money than she was, probably actually puked, and went to teach at an art school so that she could focus on something more satisfying than illustrating septuagenarian men’s sexual fantasy of a young girl.

Doogan never really got over the Mortie episodes (who can blame her?), and her work has been the anti-logo girl since then. She paints aging, sagging, scarred, hyper realistic bodies. Often female, and often her own. Her paintings have titles like Femaelstrom and Angry Aging Bitch. She’s not being cute, she’s painting the patriarchy’s least favorite thing: women that outlive male desire.

The patriarchy’s other least favorite thing is women that do better than the boys. Doogan was denied tenure after six years of teaching at the University of Arizona, but was given a re-vote when an investigating dean discovered that every member of the jury gave a different answer for why Doogan was rejected: *cough* misogyny *cough*. The next vote was unanimously in her favor.

Doogan is an intuitive painter, and bodies appear in her work depending on how she feels and what she needs. When the Iraq War started she saw a woman examining various parts of her body. After getting depressed while faking civility for art world functions she did self portraits with her hand pulling her mouth into a smile for fake social acceptability. She tried to paint her daughter’s pet Chihuahua but created women in skirts instead — something about the 2016 presidential election. There’s a mystical goings-on in Doogan’s work and probably the secret lies beyond menopause, in the world outside of baby-making narratives where a bottle of milk at your doorstep isn’t a joke about your mom sleeping around, it’s just a bottle of milk on your doorstep.