Dorothy Strauser, wife of the late artist Sterling Strauser, was born in 1908. Dorothy and Sterling married in 1928 and were important collectors and supporters of American folk art. Strauser, herself, worked mainly in the mediums of watercolor and her own unique "cloth" paintings in which she used hand-dyed cloth that was "hooked" into a burlap backing.

Famed Pulitzer-prize winning art critic Emily Genauaer once wrote of Strauser's cloth compositions, "Her hooked rug pictures have a rather quaint and primitive charm, being toy-like subjects woven in fresh colors, unpretentious and imaginative." These cloth hookings were also referred to in "ArtNews" as "humorous and skillful." A writer for "Art Digest" stated that "in...