Born in Bryan, Texas, and raised in Houston, Dorothy Hood won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1930s, then worked as a model in New York to earn money for classes at the Art Students League. On a whim, she drove a roadster to Mexico City with friends in 1941 and ended up staying for more than twenty years. Hood was front and center at the cultural, political, and social crossroads of Mexico and Latin America during a period of intense creative ferment. She developed close friendships with the exiled European intelligentsia and Latin American surrealists: artists, composers, poets, playwrights, and revolutionary writers. She married the Bolivian composer José María Velasco Maidana, and together they traveled all over the world. Once back in Houston, Hood produced epic paintings that evoked the psychic void of space: large-scale works evoking primordial seas, volcanic explosions, and the cosmos contained within the mind. The Color of Being / El Color del Ser establishes a vital connection among Texas, Latin America, New York, and Europe. It celebrates this important Modernist painter whose oeuvre is integral to the ongoing dialogue of abstraction by artists of the postwar period. Sponsored by the Art Museum of South Texas

Roger Winter has always been preoccupied with “recording reality in all its strangeness,” in the words of biographer and art historian Susie Kalil. His works partake of wide-ranging influences: childhood memories of gospel hymns blaring from a loudspeaker atop the “Holy Roller” church near his home; strange totems composed of crows, foxes, angels, and old family photographs; rusted cars resting among chest-high weeds; faces reflected in the windows of a New York City bus. According to his siblings, he has been an artist since he was “pre-verbal,” and in a career spanning eight decades, he has continually reinvented himself, breaching the boundaries of one stylistic convention after another—never content to allow the expression of his vision to be constrained to a single vocabulary. In this definitive retrospective of Winter’s life and art, Kalil explores not only the myriad influences of the artist and his dizzying stylistic journey but also allows Winter’s work to pose important questions: Why do some people become artists and others don’t? What gives artists their unique modes of perception and expression? Where is the line of separation between what is seen and what is represented? Between the maker and what is made? The Art of Roger Winter: Fire and Ice offers an in-depth portrait of one of today’s most important American painters. Critics, collectors, scholars, students, and art lovers will glean deep insights from this study in contrasts.

Winner, 2018 CASETA Publication Award, sponsored by the Center for Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art Richard Stout’s legacy as an artist is broad, deep, and firmly moored to his Texas Gulf Coast origins. Born in Beaumont in 1934, he has been painting, sculpting, and teaching in Houston since 1957, in the process creating both an influential body of work and a committed national and international following among artists and collectors. Stout’s expressionist oeuvre, possessing architectural structuralism with geometric precision, has found its place in prominent museum and private collections not only in Texas, but also nationally and internationally. His works have appeared in most major American exhibitions and have traveled to Europe, Australia, and Asia. In this, the first retrospective study of a career spanning one of the most tumultuous and formative periods in Texas art, the editors have gathered a critical examination and meticulously researched assessment of the evolution in the artist’s style and approach. Richly illustrated with representative paintings and sculptures from throughout Stout’s career, Sense of Home also provides a comprehensive biographical background, illuminating in multiple dimensions the life and work of one of Texas’ most significant contemporary artists.

Everyone has secrets, but some can change your life forever... In the midst of the Second World War, Eva receives the devastating news that her husband is missing and presumed dead. Neither wife nor widow, she lives in a numb state of limbo until, in the heat of an English summer, she meets Bill, a black American GI. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, neither can deny the love that overcomes them in the frantic weeks that follow, when every day could be their last. After Eva discovers she's pregnant, Bill is shipped off to join the D-day fight, leaving her alone in a bigoted world. As her mixed-race daughter, Louisa, grows up, how far will Eva go to keep her safe and bury the past? And how far will Louisa go to uncover the truth? Revised edition: Previously published as With Love and Crocodiles: The Untold Story of a War Bride, this edition of The Color of Secrets includes editorial revisions.

A significant collection of Texas paintings and prints hangs humbly and inconspicuously throughout the offices, conference rooms, and hallways of Texas A&M University Press. These works comprise the Frank H. Wardlaw Collection of Texas Art, named in honor of the Press’s founding director, who was one of the genuine publishing icons of his day. Established in 1983 at the dedication of the new headquarters of Texas A&M University Press on the campus of Texas A&M, the collection began with twenty inaugural contributions that came as gifts from respected Texas artists whose art appeared in the books Wardlaw had shepherded to publication at the Press. Since then, the collection—which continues to be linked to artists published by the Press—has grown to house more than one hundred paintings, photographs, and illustrations. Among the noted artists featured in the collection are E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz, Otis Dozier, Michael Frary, Everett Spruce, Emily Guthrie Smith, Jerry Bywaters, and, among more recent additions, Dorothy Hood and Richard Stout. Through interviews with longtime staff and research into the Press’s book files and correspondence, William and Linda Reaves have uncovered the captivating history of this unlikely collection. In A Book Maker’s Art, they present the freshly assembled story of the Wardlaw collection, from its modest yet unique beginning to its present-day status as one of the university’s excellent collections of Texas art, reflecting the exceptional bond of arts and letters that has come to distinguish Texas A&M University Press.

Winner, 2019 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book, sponsored by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) In this expansive and vigorous survey of the Houston art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, author Pete Gershon describes the city’s emergence as a locus for the arts, fueled by a boom in oil prices and by the arrival of several catalyzing figures, including museum director James Harithas and sculptor James Surls. Harithas was a fierce champion for Texan artists during his tenure as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum–Houston (CAM). He put Texas artists on the map, but his renegade style proved too confrontational for the museum’s benefactors, and after four years, he wore out his welcome. After Harithas’s departure from the CAM, the chainsaw-wielding Surls established the Lawndale Annex as a largely unsupervised outpost of the University of Houston art department. Inside this dirty, cavernous warehouse, a new generation of Houston artists discovered their identities and began to flourish. Both the CAM and the Lawndale Annex set the scene for the emergence of small, downtown, artist-run spaces, including Studio One, the Center for Art and Performance, Midtown Arts Center, and DiverseWorks. Finally, in 1985, the Museum of Fine Arts presented Fresh Paint: The Houston School, a nationally publicized survey of work by Houston painters. The exhibition capped an era of intensive artistic development and suggested that the city was about to be recognized, along with New York and Los Angeles, as a major center for art-making activity. Drawing upon primary archival materials, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, and over sixty interviews with significant figures, Gershon presents a narrative that preserves and interweaves the stories and insights of those who transformed the Houston art scene into the vibrant community that it is today.

An entertaining yet creative way to address and celebrate diversity among young children. Like a multicolor pencil palette, what defines human beings is their uniqueness and their diversity.Vega and her colored pencils are inseparable. Together they create the most impressive drawings that are showcased in the best museum in the world: the refrigerator at home. Vega uses all the colors you can imagine for her drawings: red, yellow, blue, gold, and more.One day at school, Vega is immersed in one of her new creations when her friend Alex stops by, and peers into the box of pencils Vega had on her table. “Can you lend me the skin-colored pencil, please?” he asks. Skin-colored? Vega and Alex wonder why there is such a color in the box.With curiosity and creativity they explore the diversity skin tones of the people around them, and discover that the “skin-color” can have not just one, but a thousand shades.