Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1528556
From top: Dorothy Hood with Subterranean Illuminations, circa 1976. Dorothy Hood's Ingeli, 1969, at McClain Gallery. COURTESY MEREDITH LONG & COMPANY, © ESTATE OF DOROTHY HOOD This fall, McClain Gallery unfurls a new look at Houston artist Dorothy Hood, who might just be Texas' greatest 20th-century painter. Catherine D. Anspon reexamines the legacy and life of the queen of abstraction. Rediscovering Dorothy A quarter century has passed since Dorothy Hood's death, and our age seems ready to rethink the c o n t r i b u t i o n s and creations of an artist believed by many to be Texas' greatest 20th-century painter. Her art can be found in major museum collections coast to coast and was the subject of two critically acclaimed Texas museum exhibitions in recent memory: a 2018/2019 focus show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curated by Alison de Lima Greene, which paired Hood with American sculptor Louise Nevelson, and the 2016 survey at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi — keeper of the artist's estate and significant artworks, some of which have never entered the permanent collection and are now being offered at McClain Gallery in the exhibition "Dorothy Hood: Celestial Voids," in order to send Hood's legacy out into the universe for a new generation of collectors. Why all this hoopla for a deceased regional painter? The answer is that Dorothy Hood was never merely a Texas painter. She had the ability to go epic and paint with a signature style that paired psychological depth with an amalgamation of color-field abstraction and surrealism honed during her time at the center of the action in Mexico City. Hood, at her best, was every bit the equal of Helen Frankenthaler. One could argue she was often better. If Frankenthaler was the East Coast master of lyrical, powerful ab-ex and color-field painting mined from landscape, then Hood was the Southwest's proponent of a tough yet tender take on living in an environment defined by vastness. (Continued) 56