Dorothy Hood

Known for her expansive compositions that merge elements of abstraction and color field painting, Dorothy Hood is considered a trailblazer among female Modernists for her epically scaled works. Raised in Houston, Hood studied at RISD and the Art Students League of New York before settling in Mexico City in 1941. Over the next two decades, she became immersed in the city’s rich bohemian culture and befriended well-known Mexican artists and intellectuals and European émigrés. Through poet and activist Pablo Neruda she met the muralist José Clemente Orozco, who became her mentor. Hood returned to Houston in the early 1960s, where she produced some of her most celebrated canvases. Although she received the support of influential critics and curators, including Clement Greenberg and Philippe de Montebello, she never received the widespread acclaim of her female peers like Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—due in part to her absence from the New York art world—and her contributions to modern art are often undeservingly overlooked.