THE MISSION PROJECTS presents an Artist Focus on Texas-born painter Dorothy Hood (1918 – 2000), organized in partnership with McClain Gallery (Houston, TX). One of the first American abstract surrealists, Hood is best known for her sprawling, large-scale paintings that merge abstraction with color field painting. This Artist Focus, entitled Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood, will include paintings, collages, and drawings from the 1960s – 1990s that showcase Hood’s masterful use of color and her consideration of physical and mental landscapes. From expansive, large-format paintings washed with intense hues to carefully arranged, intricate collages, the selection highlights Hood’s fascination with the cosmos, mysticism, science, spirituality, and outer space.
Dorothy Hood cultivated her artistic practice in Mexico City in the 1940s, an epicenter of profound cultural, political, and artistic transformation. She befriended and worked alongside exiled European artists and Latin American surrealists and married Bolivian composer José María Velasco Maidana. Upon returning to Houston with her husband in the 1960s, she began making massive paintings flooded with vivid color, marrying elements of Mexican surrealism and New York abstraction in a new and remarkable way. Striking and rich in emotion, Hood’s works explore and evoke the vast unknown of the universe, the cosmos, and the psyche. Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood also presents a focused look at the artist’s collages, which she began making in 1982. While more modest in scale and recognition than her paintings, these works underscore Hood’s curious material experimentation and offer a more intimate view of her process.
DOROTHY HOOD (1918 - 2000) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first at the Rhode Island School of Design, then at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. In 1962, she returned to Houston and presented solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Her work is included in the permanent collections of several American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; among many other institutions. In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized the first major retrospective of her works and published a monograph about her life and career entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented a two-person exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists.
Collection visits available by appointment. Email rebecca@themissionprojects.com to schedule.
