Dorothy Hood

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of the American artist Dorothy Hood (1918-2000) while announcing its representation of her estate alongside McClain Gallery of Houston, Texas. Hood was a pioneering figure of American Modernism who fused Abstract Expressionism with elements of surrealism and was heavily influenced by the two decades she spent immersed in the Mexican art scene while living in Mexico City and Puebla. Dorothy Hood: Remember Something Out of Time will reintroduce New York audiences to the artist, who has not been the focus of an exhibition here since the early 1980s.  Featuring eight paintings alongside drawings and collages, the exhibition will showcase Hood’s work from the 1960s through the 1990s. Dorothy Hood: Remember Something Out of Time will be on view on the first floor of Hollis Taggart from February 27 through April 12, 2025 and will open with a reception on Thursday, February 27, from 6 to 8PM.

Raised in Houston, Texas, Hood studied at the Rhode Island School of Design on a full scholarship before moving to New York City, where she worked as a model to fund her studies at the Art Students League. In 1941, on what was intended to be a two-week painting trip, Hood drove to Mexico City with two friends. Enthralled with the zeitgeist of Mexico, she remained in Mexico City and Puebla for more than twenty years, encouraged by the greater level of freedom for women artists. She found herself at the forefront of Mexico City’s vibrant avant-garde community that included a dynamic mix of exiled European intellectuals and Mexican artists such as Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Neruda, Sophie Treadwell, and Remedios Varo. In 1943, Neruda introduced Hood to the renowned muralist José Clemente Orozco, who served as her mentor for the next decade.

Hood returned to Houston in 1961, where she produced many of her most celebrated paintings, some of which are on view in Remembering Something Out of Time. Compositionally expansive, these large-scale canvases blend the artist’s interests in Color Field theory with abstraction, resulting in sweeping fields of color fractured by jagged fissures. These “landscapes of my psyche,” as Hood often described her paintings, explore the fracturing of imagined and emotional landscapes. A great painting, she stated, “makes you remember something out of time.”

In spite of the male-dominated art world of Houston, Hood established herself as a force through three solo exhibitions in major Texas museums by 1971: Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Sewell Art Gallery at Rice University, and Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio. However, despite the support of important American critics, curators, and philanthropists like Clement Greenberg, Dorothy Miller, and Dominique de Menil, Hood’s distance from the cultural center of New York left her out of the spotlight. Remembering Something Out of Times makes the case that Dorothy Hood’s Houston paintings are among some of the finest and most experimental examples of Texan—and American—Modernist painting.

The exhibition will also include works from the 1980s, when Hood spent significant time at NASA, forming relationships with scientists and astronauts to create a series of drawings about the inner and outer cosmos. Space Float (circa 1979) demonstrates Hood’s interest in exploring the concept of the void and her desire to capture this through her art. The show will also include a number of collages Hood made while experimenting with materials such as stationery, newspaper clippings, textile scraps, gold leaf, and gift wrap. Many of her collages explore multidimensionality and also play with imagery related to the space age and cybernetics.

Dorothy Hood’s work has received critical attention over the past decade with two museum exhibitions: Color of Being /El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood, at the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, in 2016, and Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2019, along with solo shows at McClain Gallery in Houston. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many other institutions.

For more information about Dorothy Hood: Remember Something Out of Time, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.