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For Dorothy Hood, collage became a way to maintain her creative spontaneity and a connection to the world during the long periods she spent isolated in her studio. Hood made thousands of collages in the last two decades of her life, incorporating a wide range of materials, such as decorative paper, gold leaf, National Geographic photographs, art historical reproductions, newspaper clippings, and bits of her own watercolors and canvases.

Hood is best known as a painter of large-scale abstractions that suggest a deep space—intergalactic, mental, or primordial. In the more intimate medium of collage, the associations between the layered fragments and images she selected similarly evoke the depths of memory. “A collage flatly says where we have been,” Hood stated. “Each chosen and found scrap of paper represents a social history, and picking out a paper sample corresponding to our experience and spirit strung together, make[s] a narrative memory.”