Dozier Bell

Dozier Bell studied art with Neil Welliver in the University of Pennsylvania MFA program and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The seventh generation a Maine family, she currently lives in the midcoast. Since her first solo show in 1987, Bell has appeared over forty solo exhibits in New York City and across the country. She is the recipient of several awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, and the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Fellowships include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Maine College of Art in 1997. Her work is included in numerous museum and corporate collections nationwide.

Dozier Bell - Statement for Migration, 1

The consciousness of animals and the extent to which humans share in it has always been a primary focus of my work. I work mostly from memory, using images I see on a daily basis, such as bird flight formations against typically overcast New England skies.“Participating consciousness,” said cultural historian Morris Berman, “involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene.” Holding the image of a place in memory, allowing it to gather to itself everything in my own consciousness with which it resonates, feels like a form of what Berman describes. It removes the illusion of separateness that is such a prominent feature of contemporary life.