Subscribe: RSS
The Hood Museum of Art membership program was founded in July 2007 to provide vital support for visual arts at Dartmouth College and arts education for children and families throughout the region. Through the generosity of its members, the museum is able to sponsor events, lectures, gallery talks, and symposia, in addition to funding acquisitions of works of art. More importantly, contributions make it possible to offer educational programs such as ArtVentures, Teen Workshops, and Family Days free of charge. When you become a member of the Hood Museum of Art, you will receive special benefits, including discounts at the Museum Shop, priority processing of ticket purchases to Hopkins Center performances, a subscription to the Hood Quarterly, and invitations to exclusive member-only events. A range of membership levels will help you make the choice that is most meaningful to you. The business and professional communities are encouraged to support the arts through the corporate membership level.
Click here for more information on the program and the various membership levels.
For additional information about individual or corporate memberships, or to become a member of the Hood Museum of Art, please call (603) 646-2808 or email hood.membership@dartmouth.edu.
Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College
Campaign Priorities
Revised February 27, 2006
Dartmouth College possesses one of the oldest and most respected campus-based art museums in the United States. The earliest acquisitions came into the "young museum at Dartmouth" in 1772. Those objects--among them a mastodon molar--are still on site and can be studied by undergraduates and faculty today. College collections grew steadily, if unsystematically, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with museum exhibits spread throughout various academic departments (for example, Anthropology, Art History, Studio Art, Classics). In the late 1970s the administration initiated plans to gather all of the College collections in a freestanding, state-of-the-art facility to be called the Hood Museum of Art (after longtime College trustee Harvey P. Hood, whose family made a generous gift toward the construction of the museum building).
The renowned postmodernist architect Charles W. Moore began designing the Hood in 1981, and the building opened to sustained critical approval in September 1985. Since then, the collections have grown in both quantity and quality. Today the museum preserves almost 65,000 objects from throughout the world. All of these objects are available for study in the public galleries, or else privately (by appointment) in the Bernstein Study-Storage facility. Special strengths reside in collections of Old Master prints, Native American art, Oceanic art, colonial American silver, American paintings and drawings, and contemporary sculpture. The Hood's reputation as a model teaching museum has been underscored by the exhibitions that it regularly organizes and travels to other leading institutions throughout the United States, including The Age of the Marvelous (1991), Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France (1997), Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 (2002), and Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (2003). These projects receive major outside funding support from government and private agencies. Recent grants have come to the museum from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (U.S.A.), and the US/Mexico Fund for Culture. Public programs are vibrant at the Hood and, as a result, the museum attracts roughly 40,000 visitors per year (approximately a third of whom are students).
The museum consists of approximately 40,000 square feet of usable space, divided between galleries, storage, workshops, and administrative purposes. At present, the staff is comprised of approximately twenty-five full-time employees (many of whom have advanced degrees in art history or related fields), eight to ten part-time employees, and dozens of community volunteers. Additionally, through a highly competitive process the museum appoints between five and ten senior interns per academic year. Exhibitions, acquisitions, and other programs at the museum are described in an illustrated magazine, the Hood Quarterly, which appears four times a year. Roughly 50 percent of the annual operating budget of the museum is contributed by Dartmouth College. The rest is raised by the director or else derives from endowment income.
The last fundraising effort on behalf of the College yielded significant new support for Education and Academic Programming at the Hood. Thanks largely to the Charles Hood and Andrew Mellon Foundations, these areas have developed substantial, relatively secure funding that is scaled appropriately to the fundamental teaching purpose of this institution. The focus of the next few years of fundraising will be toward new, equally worthy institutional priorities, as described below.
