The painter Dorothy Hood played an important role in mid century American modernism by fusing together the styles of Mexican social realism and the New York School to create a unique Texas borderland aesthetic. From 1943-1960 Hood studied under celebrated muralist José Clemente Orozco and earned a name for herself as a respected artist in Mexico. She was frequently in the company of Latin American artists, writers, and intellectuals while continuing to hone her own painting practice. Hood returned to Houston in 1961, and produced many of her most celebrated paintings through the mid to late 1970s. These expansive, large-scale canvases of the early 1960s, merge Color Field theory with rich post-painterly abstraction, and place Hood among the few recognized American women of this time who painted at this scale and with such pioneering skill. Despite the support of important American critics, curators, and philanthropists like Clement Greenberg, Dorothy Miller, and Dominique de Menil, Hood’s distance from the seismic cultural shifts taking place in New York left her out of the spotlight shared by recognized women artists such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner. The University of Houston is an important destination for scholars, students and others interested in the work of Hood. The Dorothy Hood Papers (1920s-1990s), owned by Public Art UHS, are held at the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections and are available for research purposes. 

Hood found collage to be a quiet creative respite away from the emotionally taxing work of painting. Therefore, her collages display an air of whimsy and play that she did not normally allow viewers to see. Many of these works were created later in her career, in the 1980s and 1990s. The collage’s fusion of various media into one piece is a conversation of materials that Hood found freeing. She allowed these cut-and-paste works to express a different aspect of herself than she allowed with her painting practice. Here, in Untitled–Orange and Red Collage, a foundation of newspaper print (the real estate section) lends a structural narrative that is layered upon with various papers of different textures, colors, and prints. Carefully torn papers, such as wrapping paper and an envelope with stamps, are specifically placed to work together to perhaps express a gift being given or of communication from a far away place. Blotches of diluted  red and brown paints are splashed onto the local Houston newsprint. 

Born in Bryan, Texas Dorothy Hood grew up in Houston and attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students League in New York City in the 1930s. On a whim, in 1941 the artist moved to Mexico City where she was to live there for twenty years. She returned to Houston in 1961, and served as an instructor at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work was exhibited in Rice University’s Fondren Library in 1962 and in the Sewall Art Gallery in 1971. In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi mounted the first major retrospective of her work with the exhibit The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918-2000 featuring 160 paintings, collages, and works on paper. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Menil Collection; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; among many other institutions.