Dozier Bell

Conflict Series No. 10, 1998

Dozier Bell (American, born 1957), Conflict Series No. 10, 1998, acrylic on linen, 8 x 9 in. Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, 1999.6.

Born in Maine, Dozier Bell graduated from Smith College in 1981. She studied with the artist Neil Welliver and received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. In her small but evocative landscapes from the Conflict Series, Bell reflects on remote sensing technologies. She states: “Remote sensing technologies are, in some sense, twentieth-century versions of the twelfth-century German concept of Heimsuchung. Its original meaning—a visitation by God—gradually gave way to its use as a term for the singling out of a person or people for visitation by disasters such as plague, famine and war; and yet the term still encompasses these two extremes of human experience: everyday union with the divine, and the devastation and annihilation of the physical self and/or its environment. These images seek to encompass both our present-day awareness of the potential for destruction on an unprecedented scale, and the corresponding vastness of the divine.”