The Color of Being/ El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000)

The Art Museum of South Texas has received major funding support to document and honor the life and career of 20th century American artist and Texas Modernist, Dorothy Hood. Her life and art will be profiled in an exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/ El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000) - the first major critical overview of Hood's paintings and works on paper produced from the 1930s until her death in 2000. The exhibition will fill most of the Museum. Works of art for the exhibition will be drawn from the important museums, foundations, and private collections across the country. Hood's work is in the permanent collections of over 30 major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Dallas Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

The first major retrospective of the early Texas abstract artist and renowned 20th century Modernist, Dorothy Hood, featuring 160 works. This vibrant exhibition springs to life through interactive interpretives, providing a rich, immersive experience into the world of Dorothy Hood through her art. Watch an abstracted version of yourself walk along the corridor, “virtually touch” a Hood painting to explore her techniques, view the cosmos overhead in the gallery and even create a larger-than-life digital painting using Dorothy’s techniques with your own gestures!

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918-2000, establishes a vital connection among Texas, Latin America, New York, and Europe. It celebrates this important Modernist painter whose oeuvre is integral to the ongoing dialogue of abstraction by artists of the postwar period. 

Hood was front and center at the cultural, political, and social crossroads of Mexico and Latin America during a period of intense creative ferment. She developed close friendships with the exiled European intelligentsia and Latin American surrealists: artists, composers, poets, playwrights, and revolutionary writers. She married the Bolivian composer José María Velasco Maidana, and together they traveled all over the world. Born in Bryan, Texas, and raised in Houston, Dorothy Hood won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1930s, then worked as a model in New York to earn money for classes at the Art Students League. On a whim, she drove a roadster to Mexico City with friends in 1941 and ended up staying for more than twenty years. Once back in Houston, Hood produced epic paintings that evoked the psychic void of space: large-scale works evoking primordial seas, volcanic explosions, and the cosmos contained within the mind.