About the Collection
The Otis Dozier Sketchbooks digital collection contains facsimiles of 130 sketchbooks, comprising some 6,400 pages, by the Texas Regionalist artist, Otis Dozier (1904-1987). The sketchbooks, which span Dozier's artistic career from the 1930s-1980s, contain drawings on a variety of subjects, including people, plants, animals, and buildings.
The digital collection is a joint project between the , °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â's Bywaters Special Collections and Norwick Center for Digital Solutions.
The Life and Work of Otis Dozier
Otis Dozier (1904-1987) was raised on a cotton farm between Forney and Mesquite, developing a love for art and nature at a young age.  After his family moved to Dallas in 1920, he received his earliest art training from well-known instructor Vivian Aunspaugh. Following his 1925 graduation from Forest High School, Dozier continued his art studies at the Dallas Art Institute with Olin Travis and Tom Stell. 
Six of Dozier’s works were included in 1932’s “Exhibition of Young Dallas Painters”; a number of these artists, including Dozier, Jerry Bywaters, John Douglass, Alexandre Hogue, William Lester, and Everett Spruce, would go on to form such significant local organizations as the Dallas Artists League and the Lone Star Printmakers. Dozier also was represented in the Texas Centennial Exposition’s art exhibit during the summer of 1936.
Following his 1940 marriage to Velma Davis, the couple explored much of Colorado, with Dozier producing more than 3,000 sketches of mountains and mining towns in the course of his career. In 1945, the Doziers returned to Dallas at the invitation of Jerry Bywaters, where he taught for a few years at °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â and at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts School until 1970. 
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Doziers’ international travels prompted him to include Indian and Asian subjects in his work. Although Dozier moved away from the anecdotal subject matter of his 1930s work for several decades, in the final years of his life he returned to childhood roots and early interests, as he again executed depictions of Texas rural life and the natural world.
He and Velma Dozier played significant roles in the cultural life of Dallas until their deaths in the late 1980s. The Dozier Foundation, established after their deaths, donated Otis Dozier’s sketchbooks to the Dallas Museum of Art and the rest of the couple’s papers to °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â’s Hamon Arts Library, where they are held as part of the Bywaters Special Collections.