Dorothy Hood “Transportation of the Spheres”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dorothy Hood created a series of collages on mat board that construct a narrative around her life and interests, one often more difficult to access from her better-known, but more biographically opaque, abstract paintings. Drawing from the modernist collage tradition inaugurated by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso near the turn of the last century, and further refined by the Surrealists and Pop artists, Hood used a diverse array of found images and layered visual and cultural references, to assemble these psychologically revealing collages. In the 1940s, Dorothy Hood settled into one of the most bohemian and cosmopolitan artistic communities in the world, Mexico City, where she established herself as a pioneer of modernism. For nearly two decades she was ensconced in a milieu that included Mexico’s leading artists and intellectuals as well as the many European expatriates who had arrived in the aftermath of war and political upheaval. Among those in her circle were Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. In 1962, Hood returned to her native Texas, settling in Houston, where she remained for the rest of her life. The suite of collages featured in this exhibition were unearthed posthumously, accounting for their broad date range, and they reveal the cultural imagination of an artist whose life was shaped by unceasing exploration, both geographic and metaphysical. Planetary bodies, commingle with Aztec deities, what Hood referred to as “grumpy gods”—perhaps alluding to millennial anxieties then on the horizon. Elsewhere, skulls, specimens from the natural world, and animals dominate the compositions. One work, Transportation of the Spheres, slyly incorporates the hood of an automobile, a humorous autobiographical play on her surname, but also highlights the concept of the passage of time—the literal transportation of spherical celestial bodies through space, around the sun. Throughout the works, themes of memento mori and humanity’s place within the natural order, and perhaps within the cosmos itself, recur with remarkable consistency. Yet for all their existential inquiry, the collages often strike a playful note, animated by Hood’s distinctive color sensibility and extraordinary compositional refinement. In addition to this previously unshown suite of collages, the exhibition includes Pedernal (1975), a painting in which Hood’s characteristic staining technique and fragmented compositional structure are particularly evident. Visually evocative of torn papers layered atop one another, the work illuminates an important connection between the collage and painting dimensions of Hood’s practice. Looking at Pedernal, it is easy to imagine a reciprocal relationship between the two bodies of work, each informing and enriching the other. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, among others. In the years since her death in 2000, scholarly and institutional attention has increasingly returned to Hood’s contributions to art history. While Hood enjoyed significant recognition during her career, recent reassessments have further secured her place within the canon of postwar modernism, affirming the importance of an artistic legacy that has long deserved broader acknowledgment.