Dorothy Hood

"Dorothy Hood’s spiritual, symbolic, and profoundly regenerative work precisely addresses human pain and loneliness. The emotional introspection at the core of Hood’s drawings is foundational to her friends and colleagues, including Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning. They are long overdue for broader recognition."

—Paul Schimmel

Carlye Packer is pleased to present The Huntress, an exhibition of drawings by Dorothy Hood (b. 1918 Bryan, TX; d. 2000, Houston, TX) organized by Paul Schimmel.

In 1941 when Hood, on an impromptu trip to Mexico City, decided to stay for the better part of the next 20 years, she was entering into one of the most cosmopolitan and avant-garde art scenes in the world.

Andre Breton‘s third and final surrealist exhibition had just opened in 1940 and World War II had brought both European and American artists together. Still in her 20s, having attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Hood was quick to develop an abstract synthetic surrealism that was to bring her significant international acclaim.

During this pivotal time in Hood's career, Dorothy Miller brought her into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where the work was exhibited in 1947 and Marion Willard gave her a one person show at her influential New York City gallery. Hood would also develop a profound relationship with José Clemente Orozco, who lent her a studio. Orozco also championed other women of Hood's own generation, including Leonora Carrington, Sophie Treadwell and Dorothea Tanning.

It has taken decades for Dorothy Hood and her female contemporaries, including Louise Bourgeois, to achieve recognition for their early surrealist inspired work, and for their contribution to the 20th century visual arts. Hood's spiritual, symbolic, and profoundly regenerative work precisely addressed human pain and loneliness. Hood’s contribution that was recognized so early on is richly deserving to be rewritten back into a history that is increasingly inclusive of women artists' legacies.

Dorothy Hood (b. 1918, Bryan, Texas, US; d. 2000, Houston, Texas, US) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of post-war and post-revolutionary bohemia.

Hood befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.

In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, among others.

In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Dorothy Hood's works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood (1918-2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists.

In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth, and, in 2020, Dorothy Hood: Collage. In 2022, McClain Gallery mounted the group exhibition Cosmic Eye of the Little Bird, contextualizing the drawings of Dorothy Hood with the work of her contemporaries as well as younger artists.