Despite being a key founding member of the Borough Group, Dorothy Mead is a little known name in British art history today. Born in London, Mead studied at the Dagenham School of Art in the 1940s. During this time, she met David Bomberg and followed him to Borough Polytechnic to study under him between 1944 and 1951. Alongside his students (including Dennis Creffield and Cliff Holden) Mead founded the Borough Group, which championed and developed Bomberg's practice and ideas.
Mead attended the Slade School of Art from 1956 and while in attendance, became the first female president of the Young Contemporaries group and was awarded multiple prizes for her work. Her time at the Slade was however, cut short, as she was asked to leave in 1959 after critiquing the curriculum and refusing to attended courses on perspective.
Over the 1960s Mead's artistic practice continued to develop. She exhibited in several group shows including The Arts Council exhibition 'Six Young Painters' in 1964 with Peter Blake, William Crozier, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Euan Uglow. The same year, Mead became a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, where she was known to challenge 'old fashioned' ideaologies. She continued to teach and lecture at wider London institutions including Chelsea College of Art in the 1970s.
Mead struggled with establishing a reputation and despite positive acclaim for her work, felt considerably marginalised as a woman artist. She never had a solo exhibition within her lifetime (the first being 30 years after her death). She became the first woman president of the London Group in 1971. In the same year her work entered the Tate Collection, four years before she passed away aged just 46 from a brain tumour.