Otis Dozier, 83
of Dallas

DALLAS ARTIST OTIS DOZIER DIES AT 83 Best-known works depicted Southwest, Depression era
Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, 29 July 1987

Longtime Dallas artist Otis Dozier, one of the most prominent regional painters of his generation, died of heart failure Tuesday in Dallas. He was 83.

Dozier’s work figured prominently in the Dallas Museum of Art’s sesquicentennial exhibit, “Lone Star Regionalism: The Dallas Nine and Their Circle, 1928-1945,’ which focused on a dynamic group of Texas artists who gained national attention early in their careers.

“What strikes me about this whole generation is that for decades before the level of art activity in Dallas was what it is today, the flame was carried by people like Otis Dozier and (Dallas artist) Jerry Bywaters,’ said William B. Jordan, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and former director of the Meadows Museum.

“We today often forget this and we should be reminded of the debt we owe them for carrying our institutions through a very difficult period of development.’

Dozier’s work is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.; the Denver Art Museum; the San Antonio Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University.

Born in nearby Forney, Dozier moved to Dallas in the 1920s and received his first formal training at the Vivian Aunspaugh School of Art. He left Texas in 1937 when he won a scholarship to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in Colorado and two years later joined its faculty, teaching landscape, life drawing and pottery.

In 1940 Dozier married Dallas artist and goldsmith Velma Davis, and in 1945 he returned to Texas to join the staff of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art), where he taught until 1970.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Dozier worked on a number of public art projects, painting murals in several Texas post offices, including those of Arlington and Fredericksburg. He also exhibited nationally, at the New York World’s Fair and at prestigious New York institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His most evocative paintings depicted scenes from the Depression era and the vast Southwestern landscape, with its strong rock formations and dry desert plants. But he based many of his works of the 1950s and 1960s on his extensive travels, which took him to Mexico, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India, Ceylon, Thailand and Japan.

“Otis Dozier painted from the medium that produced him — the Texas earth,’ said Dallas historian A.C. Greene. “He drew his inspiration and his views from the life that he and his family had lived in North Texas but he soon reached an international understanding that made him popular in galleries throughout the world.’

At the time of his death, Dozier was working on a series of six color lithographs at Peregrine Press in Dallas, four of which he completed.

The DMA owns 29 works by Dozier, the most recent acquisitions being three 1930s paintings purchased in 1985 from “The Dallas Nine’ exhibit and three 1940-41 prints donated to the museum in 1986 by the A.H. Belo Corp. and The Dallas Morning News.

last year’s major exhibit, “The Texas Landscape,’ organized by Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Dozier is survived by his wife and two sisters, Margie Dozier of Dallas and Mrs. Wanda Mickey of Colorado Springs.

Services will be at 1 p.m. Thursday in Memorial Chapel at Restland Funeral Home and Cemetery.