Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/758043
90 THE ART MUSEUM OF SOUTH TEXAS IN CORPUS CHRISTI IS THE HOLY GRAIL FOR SEEKERS OF DOROTHY HOOD. CATHERINE D. ANSPON REPORTS ON THE LATE ARTIST'S FIRST-EVER — AND LONG OVERDUE — MUSEUM RETROSPECTIVE, WHICH OPENED THIS FALL, 16 YEARS AFTER HER DEATH. If the powers that be were giving out awards for heroics in art history, that honor would go to writer and scholar Susie Kalil. Well-known in Texas art circles for her 2010 book about Alexander Hogue (which coincided with a traveling museum retrospective she curated), Kalil is also remembered for co-curating with Barbara Rose the game-changing "Fresh Paint: The Houston School." The 1985 exhibit began at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then traveled to two other venues including PSI (now a branch of MoMA, in New York) and is still considered a benchmark for shining interest upon Houston artists. Now Kalil is focusing on an artist who has the potential to once again be the breakout national art star from Texas: Dorothy Hood. For the past five years, Kalil and the Art Museum of South Texas have been single-mindedly committed to resuscitating the internationally exhibited Houston painter from the sands of time. AMST is the repository of the Hood mother lode — her voluminous archive of paintings, collages, drawings, photographs, correspondence, all manner of ephemera, and even her ashes, as well as those of her husband, Bolivian composer/conductor José María Velasco Maidana, whose father was vice president of Bolivia. The resulting exhibition, "The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood (1918-2000)," has taken over the Corpus Christi museum: 20,000 square feet of both the original Philip Johnson- designed 1972 building (the de Menils introduced Johnson to the museum trustees and played a part in making the commission happen) and the 2006 Ricardo Legorreta The GLORIESof DOROTHY HOOD BY CATHERINE D. ANSPON COLLECTION ART MUSEUM OF SOUTH TEXAS, CORPUS CHRISTI; PHOTO LYNDA A J JONES