Dorothy Rose Hood: Pioneering Visual Artist of Texas and Mexico (1918–2000)

Dorothy Rose Hood, visual artist, was born on August 22, 1918, in Bryan, Texas, and grew up in Houston. Her parents were Frank Earl Hood, a banker, and Georgiana (Simpkins) Hood. As a young girl, Hood enjoyed soaring high in the Texas skies in a plane co-owned by her father. However, her largely comfortable, upper-middle-class upbringing was not without its difficulties. Hood’s parents separated, and her mother, with whom Hood stayed, contracted tuberculosis, a condition that necessitated long stays at a sanatorium. As a result of this domestic instability, Hood felt a sense of abandonment and experienced prolonged periods of solitude responsible, in part, for her discovery, at an early age, of a passion for art. In 1936 she graduated from San Jacinto High School in Houston.

Hood’s artistic talents won her a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. In 1940 she graduated and moved to New York City, where she continued her studies at the Art Students League and supported herself by working as a fashion model. In 1941 Hood and two artist friends took a road trip to Mexico City, where she spent the bulk of the following two decades.

In the 1940s Mexico City hosted a vibrant artistic and intellectual community that included the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, British surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, the exiled Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and many others. A particularly important contact for Hood was the politically-engaged muralist José Clemente Orozco, who nurtured her fledgling artistic career by offering her the use of his studio. Hood was also close to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who wrote a prose poem for the brochure of her first solo gallery show, The Paintings of Dorothy Hood at the Galería de Arte María Asúnsolo in 1943. It was also in Mexico City that Hood met José María Velasco Maidana, a Bolivian conductor and composer whom she married in 1945. Velasco Maidana had sparked controversy in his native Bolivia for seeking to uplift marginalized native groups in his work.

During her time in Mexico, Hood periodically returned to the United States. After one of her drawings caught the eye of John McAndrews, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the museum acquired the drawing and included it in a 1945 traveling show that also featured the work of high-profile figures such as Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. During another visit to New York in 1950, gallerist Marian Willard offered Hood a solo show—an unusual feat for a woman artist at the time. In 1962, after Velasco Maidana was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the couple left Mexico City for Houston.

Hood’s early work combined figuration and abstraction and owed a stylistic debt to surrealism. In the 1950s her mature style, juxtaposing jagged planes of solid color with abstract details, began to develop. Following her return to Houston, Hood was inspired by the city’s open landscape and proximity to the Manned Spacecraft Center (later the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) to increasingly emphasize the sensation of space in her paintings. As a result of this trend and the demand to fill the large wall spaces of office buildings and homes built by a booming oil economy, Hood’s canvases took on an epic scale, often measuring ten feet in height. In the 1980s she also began to work in collage, a medium she considered less serious than painting but in which she produced works that won praise among critics and collectors. Unlike the Latin American artists she encountered in Mexico, Hood avoided overt political content in her work. Instead she drew inspiration from depth psychology, Eastern religion, and outer space and used abstraction to convey intense emotional states. Some of her works did, however, engage with Latin American indigenous culture.

For decades Hood was a central figure in the Houston art world. She taught at the Museum of Fine Arts’ Glassell School of Art, regularly showed at Meredith Long’s gallery, and cultivated a broad network of contacts. Highlights of her career include a 1970 solo show at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and a traveling retrospective originating at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, in 1974. In addition to her artistic work, Hood was for many years a dedicated caretaker to the ailing Velasco Maidana, who died in 1989. Following his death, Hood’s work increasingly focused on mortality. She thereafter began a relationship with geneticist Krishna Dronamraju, who assumed management of the business side of her art.

Dorothy Hood died of breast cancer on October 28, 2000. Dronamraju sold her collection to the Art Museum of South Texas in exchange for payment of Hood’s outstanding medical bills, which exceeded $50,000. Though she was known primarily as a regional artist during her lifetime, a number of artists and scholars have argued for her broader importance. “Dorothy’s work is the first and most important bridge between art made in Texas and Mexico,” argued fellow Houston artist Richard Stout. Efforts to reevaluate Hood’s role in American and Latin American art history intensified in the 2010s. In 2015 the Art Museum of South Texas mounted an ambitious retrospective of her work, Dorothy Hood: The Color of Being/El Color del Ser (2016–17). Houston art collector Carolyn Farb, who had funded The Color of Life, a 1985 documentary short film about Hood, led the fundraising effort for the museum’s retrospective exhibition. The show was curated by Susie Kalil, who wrote the accompanying scholarly monograph.