Dorothy Hood; Painter Featured in Award-Winning Film

Dorothy Hood, 81, an abstract painter who befriended Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Hood was married for nearly 50 years to the late composer and conductor Velasco Maidana, the estranged son of a former president of Bolivia. Her own lush, abstract paintings were included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1958 and 1959, and in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1963 and 1975. Hood’s work is also part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and of the National Gallery in Washington. She was one of five American artists designated in 1988 for the Honor Award of the Women’s Caucus for Arts. A documentary film about her career, “Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life,” won the American Film Festival Award in 1987. During the 1940s, Hood became friends with several Latin American artists, Orozco and Neruda among them. Neruda wrote a romantic poem about her. On Sunday in Houston, of cancer.