Lloyd Goff

Born and raised in Dallas, Lloyd Goff was encouraged by his parents from an early age to become an artist. As a young man, he traveled to Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco, eventually residing in France and studying in Paris at the Académies Julian and de la Grande Chaumière. Returning to the United States, Goff accepted a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in 1936 in New York, where he was taught by George Grosz and Kenneth Hayes Miller, a leading proponent of urban genre painting and influential teacher whose other protégés included Reginald Marsh, Isabelle Bishop, Edward Hopper, and George Bellows. In the 1930s, Goff produced easel paintings for the Works Progress Administration under the Public Works of Art Project; he was also one of the Dallas Nine, an influential group of regional artists in Texas. Goff enjoyed a varied career as a painter, illustrator, muralist, graphic artist, and writer, and for a few years in the 1940s taught at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. (Falk, Who Was Who in American Art, 1999; Powers, John, and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors, & Graphic Artists, 2000)