The Park Avenue Armory
New York, NY
McClain Gallery announces its participation in the Art Dealer's Association of America's annual art fair: The Art Show 2024 taking place October 30 – November 2 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. McClain Gallery will show a two-artist presentation featuring the paintings of Dorothy Hood and Delita Martin’s print-focused collage work. Both artists hail from Houston, Texas and its environs while representing the lengthy history of the region's art and culture.
This year, ADAA The Art Show launches a new program titled "Spotlight On...," which will focus on a different city annually, beginning with Houston. Special programming will include panel discussions featuring Houston art luminaries, including representatives from esteemed Houston institutions: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC), The Menil Collection, Moody Center for the Arts, DiverseWorks, Project Row Houses, PAC Art Residency, and Orange Center for Visionary Art; as well as notable Texas-Based collectors.
DOROTHY HOOD (b. 1918, Bryan, Texas, US; d. 2000, Houston, Texas, US) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of post-war and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.
In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; among many others. 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, Jim Harithas, and Barbara Rose, among others.
In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Dorothy Hood’s works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth, and, in 2020, Dorothy Hood: Collage. In 2022, McClain Gallery staged the group exhibition Cosmic Eye of the Little Bird, contextualizing the drawings of Dorothy Hood with the work of her contemporaries as well as younger artists. McClain Gallery mounted Strangeness, Tone, Translucency, a group exhibition of collages featuring Hood, followed by a solo painting show, Dorothy Hood: Celestial Voids, in 2024.
DELITA MARTIN (b. 1972, Conroe, TX) is a master printer and draftswoman whose work explores the beauty and complexity found in the spiritual identities of African American Women. Through her mixed-media printmaking practice, which includes the layering of various printmaking processes, drawing, painting, collaging, and hand-stitching, Martin celebrates her sitters’ strength and resilience in a world that often overlooks or devalues them. Through her use of pattern, texture, and color, she creates immersive veilscapes that are deeply personal yet accessible to viewers. Her distinctive style combines elements of realism, abstractions, and symbolism, creating bold portraits of Black women. Martin received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas and MFA in printmaking from Purdue University, Indiana. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio in Huffman, Texas.
In 2024, Martin presented two major solo exhibitions. Sometimes My Blues Change Colors at the Featherstone Center for the Arts in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (July 28 – September 1, 2024) marked a historic milestone as Martin was the inaugural female African American artist to present a solo exhibition at this institution. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Myrtis Bedolla. Earlier in the year, Martin's solo retrospective Her Temple of Everyday Familiars at the Russell Hill Rogers Galleries, the University of Texas at San Antonio (January 26 – March 22, 2024) featured a retrospective of the artist’s career, including works produced in her adolescence, an interactive installation, and recent works. This exhibition was curated by Aissatou Sidime-Blanton.
Select national and international exhibitions include National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined (curated by Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland, who represents Martin), Italy; Print Association Bentlage Residency Showcase, Kloster Bentlage, Rheine, Germany. Permanent collections include: Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas; Gorman Museum, California; Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; David Driskell Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Minnesota Museum of American Art; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Petrucci Family Foundation, New Jersey; William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, Arkansas; U.S. Embassy, Nouakchott, Mauritania. Martin’s work was included in McClain Gallery’s group exhibition Strangeness, Tone, Translucency in 2024.