There’s a tension in Hood’s work between light and dark, form and void—a paradox that may tie back to her rocky childhood. Born in Bryan, Texas, in 1918 and raised in Houston, Hood was the only child of a banker father and a mother who faced mental health challenges. As a girl, Hood spent much of her time alone, and she turned to drawing and painting for solace. Her parents split when she was 11.
A terrific draftswoman, Hood won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. After RISD, she moved to Manhattan, where she studied at the storied Art Students League and modeled to pay her bills.
Along with two friends, Hood drove down to Mexico City in 1941. It was meant to be a two-week painting trip, but Hood stayed, off and on, for the next 20 years. “I never dreamed a life could be so different,” Hood recalled in The Color of Life, a 1985 documentary about her. She fell in love with the freedoms she experienced—a far cry from the Victorian ideals her mother had tried to instill—and with the history and aesthetics of pre-Columbian art.
Beautiful and charming, she made friends in Mexico City easily, and, soon, she was in a milieu of anti-war intellectuals and artists that included Kahlo, Carrington, Remedios Varo, Diego Rivera, Luis Buñuel, and Rufino Tamayo. She was mentored for a decade by José Clemente Orozco, who taught her the importance of authenticity in art. “He always said, ‘Dorothy, tell the truth at all costs. No matter what the cost is,’” she once said.
Brochure from Hood’s solo exhibition at GAMA in Mexico City, 1943.Dorothy Hood Papers, University of Houston Libraries Special Collections, Performing & Visual Arts Research. Courtesy of Hollis Taggart.
