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Born in Bryan in 1918, Dorothy Hood was raised in Houston. She moved east after high school to study art, and lived on and off in Mexico for twenty years. It was after Hood returned to Houston in the early sixties that she produced some of her most spectacular work. These towering ten-by-eight-foot paintings feature broad fields of modulated color with light surfacing from beneath. A sense of vast space and emptiness emanates from the canvases. In some, lightning bolts seem to crack through to an unknown beyond.

Hood described these works as "landscapes of my psyche." Their energy, scale, and ambition also reflect the spirit of Texas. Of her home state, she once said, "The space of Texas and the plains and the sky and everything frees me. . . . You have every element for an artist there." Hood's abstract paintings are now recognized as masterpieces of twentieth-century American art. More»