The Color of Being/ El Color Del Ser ─ Dorothy Hood, 1918-2000

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.

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.

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.

The Color of Being / El Color del Ser 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.

SUSIE KALIL is the author of Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary—Paintings and Works on Paper. She is a former Core Fellow in Critical Studies at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.