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John O'Quinn (a regular in her studio), Mavis Kelsey Sr., Carol Ballard, Isabel Brown Wilson, Diana and Bill Hobby, and Carolyn Farb. The latter served as associate producer of a 1985 documentary on Hood, The Color of Life, which won the American Film Festival Award in 1987 and was supported by the MFAH. From the '70s through the '90s, Hood continued to rule the Houston art scene along with fellow painters Dick Wray, Richard Stout, and Earl Staley. In 1970, Hood had a solo exhibition at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that marked a breakthrough and saw her working with A Dorothy Hood Primer A Texas-born only child, Hood grew up in a prosperous middle- class family in Houston's Museum District. Her circumstances changed during adolescence, due to her mother's mental illness combined with tuberculosis and her parents' divorce. Hood decamped for the East Coast with a Rhode Island School of Design scholarship in 1936, after a teacher at San Jacinto High School submitted a portfolio of drawings to the national scholarship competition. After graduating from RISD, the striking, statuesque strawberry blonde supported herself as a model, moving to NYC and attending the Art Students League. But Mexico called, and on a lark, she and a couple of pals took her new roadster (a graduation gift from her bank-exec dad) to Mexico City in 1940 and never looked back. Her ensuing double decades in Mexico added a formative, seminal layer to her unique creative narrative. Her interaction with figures ranging from Pablo Neruda (who penned a poem to her for the catalog of her first Mexico show) to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (at whose casa she met her husband, Bolivian conductor and composer J o s é M a r í a Ve l a s c o Maidana, whose father was president of Bolivia) and José Clemente Orozco (who opened up his studio to share and daily gave her lunch) would make for a compelling cinematic bio. Hood's reach back in the day extended from California to New York, including representation in the Whitney and MoMA. When she and Maidana moved to Houston in 1961, she began teaching at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's museum school; soon she claimed her place as one of the leaders in a world dominated by big, brash male painters. A vintage photograph in the AMST collection shows her as a member of the Houston Five — the only woman alongside Richard Stout, David Hickman, William Anzalone, and James Boynton. (Stout, Hickman, and Boynton have all passed away, but Anzalone, now based in Round Top, still actively paints and exhibits.) Thanks to being picked up by gallerist Meredith Long the year after she arrived in town, notable Houston art names became Hood collectors: Dominique and John de Menil, Fayez Sarofim, Nina Cullinan, 8-by-10-foot canvases. In 1984, she was named Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston. The following year, Hood was highlighted in the seminal "Fresh Paint: The Houston School," curated by Susie Kalil and Barbara Rose; the exhibition marked a milestone in Houston art history and traveled to MoMA PS1 in NYC. In this era, every major art collector owned a Hood — either one of her soaring paintings, which bridged the void, surrealism, and color field; an obsessive drawing with her signature Gothic-Surreal sensibility; or a collage that embraced globalism and sampled world cultures. The end of her life saw a rift with Meredith Long, her staunchest supporter, due to her selling work privately without his knowledge. Since her death in 2000, Hood has not exactly been forgotten — she's in 30-some American museum collections — yet few of the institutions, aside from the MFAH and AMST, and recently The Menil Collection, devote wall space to her works. However, with the icebox of art history now being raided and historic talents (especially Black and women artists) being celebrated for their accomplishments, Hood's star is once again ascendant. "Dorothy Hood: Celestial Voids," through December 28, mcclaingallery. com. Read our review at papercitymag.com. From top: Dorothy Hood's Earth Seed I, II, III, undated, at McClain Gallery. Dorothy Hood's Untitled, 1979, at McClain Gallery. (Continued from page 56) 58