Dorothy Hood US, 1919-2000
“I have looked towards an affirmative background in experiencing a world of the spiritual realm. By the spiritual we discover manifold life, folding over. Yet there is an edge of being, an attitude of seeing… I see the spirit from a pliant tension…”
-Dorothy Hood
"Dorothy Hood had all the makings of an icon. One of Texas’s most talented artists, she was a stunning strawberry blonde with a fearless sense of adventure. In 1941, fresh out of art school, she drove her dad’s roadster to Mexico City and stayed there for most of the next 22 years, drawing and painting alongside Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Roberto Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias. Pablo Neruda wrote a poem about her paintings. José Clemente Orozco befriended and encouraged her. The Bolivian director and composer José María Velasco Maidana fell hard for her and later married her. And after a brief stretch in New York City, she and Maidana moved to her native Houston, where she produced massive paintings of sweeping color that combined elements of Mexican surrealism and New York abstraction in a way that no one had seen before, winning her acclaim and promises from museums of major exhibits."
- Texas Monthly
Hood's paintings were included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1958 and 1959, and in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1963 and 1975. Hood’s work is also part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and of the National Gallery in Washington. She was one of five American artists designated in 1988 for the Honor Award of the Women’s Caucus for Arts. A documentary film about her career, “Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life,” won the American Film Festival Award in 1987.
