Dorothy Hood (1918-2000)

Born in Bryan, TX and raised in Houston, Dorothy Hood grew up the only child of a prominent banker and his first wife. While she spent the first decade of her life enjoying the trappings of an affluent lifestyle, through her own memoirs, this came to an end by the time she was 11 years old. Her parents divorced, her mother dealt with chronic illness, and Hood admitted that she effectively felt abandoned as an adolescent.

Nevertheless, she showed extraordinary artistic talent as a teenager, which earned her a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. She eventually left RISD for the Art Students League in New York, where she concurrently worked as a model. But by 1941, her bohemian spirit began to take hold, and along with a friend, Hood drove her father's sportscar to Mexico, where she would spend the next 22 years of her life. During her time in Mexico, she developed close relationships with such luminaries as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, and Rufino Tamayo, eventually establishing herself as a respected artist among the country’s most celebrated creatives. Within a few years of living in Mexico, she met the acclaimed Bolivian composer José María Velasco Maidana. Though nearly 20 years her elder, the two fell deeply in love, and were married in 1946.

Hood would recount that upon arriving in Mexico, she felt a deep, spiritual connection to the land, its people, and the way of life. But over the course of two decades, the political and societal tides began to shift, and coupled with growing health concerns for her husband, in 1962, the pair made the decision to return to her native Houston. While she felt like an outlier in Houston society, she was keen to note the level of support that she received from local patrons and the arts community at large, particularly through the conduit of Meredith Long - the renowned Houston dealer who built the collections of many of Houston's most prominent families.

But her time in Mexico was not wasted, as she experienced immense growth as a painter, while beginning to establish herself as a top-tier gallery artist. She regularly traveled to New York, and in 1950, was awarded a solo show at Marian Willard's eponymous gallery. This connection would pay significant dividends, as Hood eventually befriended Mark Tobey, who helped introduce her to notable contacts throughout Europe.

The maturation of her practice during her time in Mexico resulted in Hood hitting her artistic stride upon her return to Houston, where she would create the most significant contributions to her oeuvre throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s, Hood had firmly established herself internationally as an important American painter. During this time, she also served as an instructor at what is now the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi mounted the first major retrospective of her work: "The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918-2000," which featured 160 paintings, collages, and works on paper. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many other institutions.

Dorothy Hood's legacy as a distinguished and significant figure in both Mexican and Texas Modernist painting has been firmly cemented, and remains on an upward trajectory as scholarly exploration of her life and career continues. Upon her death in 2000, the bulk of Hood's estate was left to the Art Museum of South Texas, and is currently represented through a partnership with the McClain Gallery in Houston.

Various Sources