Biography from Aucocisco Galleries:
| Dozier Bell was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1957. She studied painting at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and as a graduate student with Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on a full scholarship in 1985. Original influences were the stillness and subdued palette of northern European painters of the Renaissance and Reformation eras, such as Memling, Campin, Holbein, Van der Weyden and Van Eyck.
In 1987, a New York City gallery began representing her imaginary landscapes, inhabited only by dogs, and she won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting. A variety of work in gouache collage, photography, and oils was tied together by the concept of a historical sense of place that precedes one’s own lifetime, an idea that Bell termed “genetic memory,” which she believed was akin to the consciousness of animals. This work was featured in a 1994 show at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, with sculptor Ken Greenleaf.
In 1991, Bell began work on a series of photomontages intended to explore more specifically the development of her own sense of place. A series of 12 photomontages, matrices of 8 or 9 photographs mounted edge-to-edge, juxtaposed images of a farm in western Maine on which her family has lived for several generations with other images familiar from childhood. These were shown as a group in 1995 at the Portland Museum of Art in conjunction with a long poem by the Maine poet Wesley McNair, whom Bell met at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy in the spring of 1993.
In 1995, a life-long interest in Germany and the World Wars led Bell to a Fulbright Fellowship at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, where she worked as an artist in residence. Out of this period came the “Conflict Series,” a group of 82 small paintings done over the course of several years, exploring the environment of war.
Readings on the technologies developed during the wars led to an interest in remote sensing technologies such as radar, sonar and LANDSAT. Bell makes use of the metaphorical dimensions of these technologies in her otherwise Romantic-influenced landscapes, which are frequently punctuated by Réseau crosses, sighting devices, and other geometric forms. In 1997, the Maine College of Art presented Bell with an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. Much of the war-inspired work was featured in solo shows at the Lyman Allyn Museum of Art in New London, Connecticut in 1998, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York in 2003, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in 2004.
Some of the most recent work explores the theme of global warming and its possible consequences by harking back to echoes of environmental catastrophes from the past, such as the period of the Black Death. Bell’s work as a whole can be seen as a continuation of the Northern Romantic tradition, with its emphasis on the terror as well as the sublime beauty of nature.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
Solo shows:
2004 Dozier Bell University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, ME
Dozier Bell: Aether National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC
2003 Dozier Bell: Meditations on Spirit, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
1998 DozierBell: Primary Themes, Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT
1995 The Dissonant Heart (in collaboration with the poet Wesley McNair)
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (catalog)
1994 Original Place: Recent Work by Dozier Bell and Ken Greenleaf
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, and Bucknell University,
Lewisburg, PA (catalog)
1991 Horizons and Beyond Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME
Bingham-Kurts Gallery, Memphis, TN
Group shows:
2008 Art in Anxious Times The Art Students’ League, New York, NY
Transcendent and Sublime Sacred Heart University Gallery, Fairfield, CT
Silence La Galeria, Barcelona, Spain
Midnight Full of Stars Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ
2006 The Figure in American Painting and Drawing, 1985-2005
Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME
2005 The Environment of Landscape: Works from the Olivia and Ellwood
Straub Collection, Bates College, Lewiston, ME
2004-07 American Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria
2004 Images of Time and Place: Contemporary Views of Landscape
The Lehman Gallery, Bronx, NY
2003/04 Facing Reality: The Seavest Collection of Contemporary Realism
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY
1998 After Nature The Herter Gallery, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, MA (catalog)
1996/97 Destiny Manifest: American Landscape Painting in the 90's
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
1996 Torn Asunder: Collage in Twentieth-Century Art
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Inside/Outside: Recent Photography from the MacDowell Colony
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Art Gallery,
University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
Changing Horizons: Landscape on the Eve of the Millennium
Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (catalog)
Fractured Fairy Tales: Art in the Age of Categorical Disintegration
Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC (catalog)
1995 Irrational Landscapes Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton,
and New York Academy of Sciences, New York, NY
1993 Landscape as Metaphor: The Transcendental Vision Fitchburg Art
Museum, Fitchburg, MA and Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI
1992 On the Edge: 40 Years of Maine Painting Maine Coast Artists, Rockport,
ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (Catalog)
1989 Landscape of the Spirit The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT (catalog)
AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS:
2003/04 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
2000 Residency at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH
1997 Achievement Award and Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree,
Maine College of Art, Portland, ME
1995/96 Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in
Weimar, Germany
1995 Residency at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH
1993 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
1993 Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference
Center in Bellagio, Italy
1990 Residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY
1987 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting
1985 Residency and full scholarship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and
Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
1981 Smith College Alumnae Association Scholarship for Graduate Study
PERMANENT MUSEUM COLLECTIONS:
Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME
Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
The Christian Keesee Collection, Oklahoma City, OK
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME
Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT
Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, ME
EDUCATION:
MFA, University of Pennsylvania, 1983-1986
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1985. Full scholarship recipient.
BA, Smith College, 1976 - 1981. Magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
CATALOGS:
Original Place Suzette McAvoy Farnsworth Art Museum, 1994
The Dissonant Heart Wesley McNair, poetry; Dozier Bell, photomontages Portland Museum of Art, 1995
Dozier Bell, Carl Little Lyman Allyn Museum, University of Connecticut, 1998
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