For other news stories, review our most recent quarterlies via pdf.
"This collection of essays is as richly insightful as it is beautifully produced. . . . The originality of the images and interpretations make this catalogue essential to understanding how fully clothed the unclothed body truly is." Click here to read the full review (scroll down).
If you had the opportunity to visit the Sean Scully exhibition over the winter, you may have encountered the Hood's first iPod audio tour, which featured the artist's personal comments on each of the paintings in the show. We now invite you to try our second iPod tour, which was developed for the exhibition Black Womanhood. It is designed to introduce you to the exhibition as a whole, familiarize you with the three different sections of the show, and describe how the art is thematically connected across sections. You can use the iPod menu to select the portions that you would like to hear as you move through the exhibition, and images of the works in the exhibition pop up on the iPod screen as you select them.
You can check out the iPod tour free of charge at the Visitor Services Desk. If you have never used an iPod, don't worry. They are easy to use, and our Visitor Services staff is ready to provide you with simple instructions.
Audio tours will become a regular part of the interpretive materials available to visitors for all major exhibitions, and we plan to develop similar tours in the future for the permanent collections. All of these iPod tours are produced by Jones Media Center at Dartmouth College in collaboration with the Hood Museum of Art.
Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African
Body
On View April 1-August 10, 2008
Opening Lecture and Symposium, April 11–12, 2008
The major traveling exhibition Black Womanhood examines the historical roots of a charged icon in contemporary art: the black female body. Three separate but intersecting perspectives--the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global--enable us to look beneath iconic images and stereotypes of black womanhood from the nineteenth century to the present.
Click here for more information.
On March 1, a crowd of more
than sixty community members of all ages gathered in the Hood's second-floor
galleries to hear musician Fred Haas riff on Sean Scully's bold stripe
paintings. Music plays an important role in Scully's creative process and he
often listens to rhythm and blues when he paints. In addition to a reading
resource area, there are also music CDs available for visitors to experience
some of the music Scully listens to while painting. Scully's work is infused
with music and he has said that the key to understanding his work is rhythm,
"the rhythm of life, the rhythm of everything."
Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe closes after March 9. Visitors can check out free iPod audio tours of the exhibition, use a Looking Guide or one of the museum's CD players to experience the large colorful paintings in tandem with music. For more information, go to the exhibition index page.
Image caption. Area musican Fred Haas responds to Scully's paintings through his saxaphone. Photography by Tilman Dette '09.
On October 7, 2007, President James
Wright (pictured at left with Anna Maria Houser and David R. W. Raynolds '49),
the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College, and the Hood Museum
of Art joined guests for the unveiling of an Allan Houser (1914-1994)
sculpture, Peaceful Serenity (1992), in front of the Sherman House.
This bronze-plated sculpture was recently acquired by the Hood Museum of Art
through the generosity of Mary Alice Kean Raynolds and David R. W. Raynolds
'49. Allan Houser, the first Chiricahua Apache child in his family born out of
captivity in the twentieth century, is regarded as one of the century’s most
important Native American artists. He played a pivotal role in the development
of Native American modern and contemporary art while teaching at the Institute
of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe from 1962 until his retirement in 1975. He
came to Dartmouth College as artist-in-residence in 1979 and in the last two
decades of his life produced almost one thousand realistic and abstract
sculptures in stone, wood, and bronze. He emerged in his later career as a
major international figure with solo exhibitions held around the world.
Houser’s unique style fused Native American themes with streamlined modernist
sensibilities in which both positive and negative space evoke action, emotion,
and relationship, as evident in Peaceful Serenity, an abstract
representation of a mother and her children.
Every year in October, in observation of National Arts and Humanities Month, the Hood Museum of Art pays tribute to its dedicated volunteer corps by naming a Volunteer of the Year. This fall, we recognized the contributions of Marjorie Cook, docent at the Hood. Margie was in the first class of docents who began the program in 1985 and in the twenty-two years since, has represented the museum with warmth, cheerfulness and enthusiasm. When speaking of Margie, her fellow docents consistently comment on her depth of knowledge, love of learning, and her generous and creative spirit. She is always willing to take on a new task and step in whenever needed and welcomes the opportunity to participate in a range of programs that engage both children and adult audiences. In 2005 Margie was one of two docents who represented the Hood by presenting at the National Docent Symposium in Boston. In addition, Margie has also been a long standing member of the museum. It is impossible to estimate how many members of the Upper Valley community she has welcomed to the Hood Museum during her time as a docent, but it is certainly in the thousands. We appreciate this opportunity to thank Margie for her contributions to the docent program, the museum and the Upper Valley community.
To learn more about National Arts and Humanties Month, click here.
The Hood Museum of Art launched its new
Membership Program on July 1, 2007. In the tradition of the Friends of Hopkins
Center and Hood Museum of Art, the program primarily raises funds for arts
education at the Hood. Membership support has long assisted the Hood in
maintaining its commitment to families and school children in the Upper Valley.
Click here
to listen to Hood Director Brian Kennedy introduce the membership program.
Through sponsored programs such as ArtVentures, Family Days, and Teen Workshops, children have opportunities to become involved in activities designed especially for them. Children ages six to twelve may participate in guided tours, discussions, and creative projects that engage them in the exploration of the visual arts. Other Hood programs invite older children, ages fourteen to eighteen, to reconsider how they view and think about art and to explore its relevance in their lives and the lives of others globally. Older children also have opportunities to create works of art and to directly experience the transformative nature of visual expression. Participants gain a sense of individual achievement, an appreciation of the accomplishments of others, and a sense of their place in the world. The stated purpose of the Hood Museum of Art is to inspire, educate, and collaborate with our academic and broader communities about creativity and imagination through direct engagement with culturally and historically significant works of art. We are grateful to the Hood Museum of Art members for their support of that ideal. In appreciation of our members' belief in the value of arts education and community leadership, we continue to offer Hood Museum of Art membership benefits, including invitations to lectures and events, a museum shop discount, and priority processing for tickets to Hopkins Center performances. Popular membership events such as the wine tastings will continue to be part of these benefits, and next year will bring wonderful new opportunities to connect with the visual arts and the Hood, including exciting member programming related directly to exhibitions.
For over twenty years the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College has been a unique and vital resource for the people of the Upper Valley and beyond. With membership support it can be even more so. To become a member of the Hood Museum of Art, call (603) 646-2808 or e-mail hoodmembership@dartmouth.edu.
Image: ArtVenture participants display their creations.
What do art and medicine have in common?
One key thing is the need for well-honed observation skills. This fact led
education staff at the museum and Dartmouth Medical School faculty to work
together to create a program to enhance future doctors’ observation and
diagnostic skills through looking at works of art. The two-hour workshop,
called The Art of Clinical Observation, is made available to medical students
through the first-year "On-Doctoring Course," which teaches interviewing,
clinical diagnosis, and relationship skills.
The program takes place in the museum galleries, with groups of six to eight students participating at a time. Each student is assigned a painting or another work of art and is asked to look carefully at the work and then present to the group about what they observe. After the work of art has been thoroughly described, students discuss an interpretation, or diagnosis, of what it is about. Finally, participants apply their heightened observation skills to diagnosing photographs of medical cases. The museum experience is facilitated by education staff and docents (volunteer gallery instructors), with On-Doctoring facilitators often contributing to the medical discussions that conclude the workshop.
Response to the workshops has been overwhelmingly positive. Students feel strongly that the experience will help them as doctors, and all of them say that they would recommend this training to colleagues. When asked what they have learned in the workshops, students share comments such as "There is so much we can miss at first glance. It just helps to stop for a moment and think about what information something (a detail) might give us," and "Closer, longer observation and focus leads to much more thorough, expansive interpretation."
Image: A Dartmouth medical student carefully studies a painting while participating in "The Art of Clinical Observation" workshop.
The New England Museum Association sponsors an annual Publication Awards Program that recognizes excellence in design, production, and effective communication in all aspects of museum publishing. Entries are judged by a panel of experienced professionals in publication, design, marketing and communications. Awards are given to those entries that most effectively present their message to the intended audience. The Hood received two awards this year, including second place for the Annual Report 2005–6 and an honorable mention for the exhibition gallery brochure Rembrandt Prints in the Collection of the Hood Museum of Art.
Wenda Gu's two-part united
nations project entitled united
nations: the green house and united
nations: united colors opened to an enthusiastic public audience on
June 6 at Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. The green house,
created for Dartmouth, is a site-specific hair screen that divides the length
of Dartmouth's Baker Library main hall. The work is made from human hair
clippings collected from thousands of Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff
and residents of the Upper Valley. President James Wright and Provost Barry
Scherr addressed the crowd with thoughts on the importance of art in unexpected
places and its role in higher education. Addresses were also presented by Jeff
Horrell, Dean of the Dartmouth Libraries, Brian Kennedy, Director of the Hood
Museum of Art, Juliette Bianco, Assistant Director of the Hood Museum of Art,
and artist Wenda Gu. The green house, and the accompanying
installation in Berry library, united nations: united colors--a
seven-mile-long multicolored hair braid representing a new idea for the United
Nations--will remain on view through October 28. A companion exhibition by
Wenda Gu, forest of stone steles: retranslation and rewriting tang dynasty
poetry, is on view in the Hood galleries through September 9.
Images: Wenda Gu stands in front of his installation in Baker Library's main hall. Photo by Kawakahi Amina '09.
To view an image gallery of the project from hair collection to the opening, click here.
Dartmouth College has acquired a celebrated portrait of its great benefactor, William Legge, the second Earl of Dartmouth (1731-1801), after whom the College was named. Read the full press release here.
Image: Pompeo Batoni, William Legge, Second Earl of Dartmouth (1731-1801), 1756, oil on canvas. Purchased through gifts from Jand and W. David Dance, Class of 1940, Tuck 1941; Jonathan L. Cohen, Class of 1960, Tuck 1961; Frederick Whittemore, Class of 1953, Tuck 1954; Barbara Dau Southwell, Class of 1978, and David Southwell, Tuck 1988; Parnassus Foundation/Jane and Raphael Bernstein; and an anonymous donor; 2007.34
