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The Hood Museum of Art has embarked upon a program that has allowed us to borrow significant works of ancient art from Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG). Initiated by YUAG and funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this collection-sharing project is intended to foster intra- and inter-institutional collaboration and expand opportunities for Dartmouth faculty from all disciplines to teach from works of art. Central to the initiative is a program of strategic loans from Yale’s encyclopedic collection, comprising nearly 200,000 works, by six “partner museums” for use in specially developed projects and related coursework. The other partner museums for the pilot project are the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts; Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts; Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. The program was created based on the belief that, while technologies have increased access to museum collections, there is no substitute for the experience of learning from original works of art.
In December 2010, the Hood borrowed forty-seven ancient Mediterranean objects from Yale for a two-year loan period. Dartmouth faculty and students from a range of disciplines, including art history, classics, religion, and history, will make use of both the Yale loans and works from the Hood collection to explore current debates about connoisseurship, provenance, and cultural patrimony, among other things. They will also consider how the close observation of works of art can reveal connections to wider cultural, religious, political, and social themes in the ancient Mediterranean world. The project will also produce a website and a documentary film.
The loans are available in the museum's Bernstein Study-Storage Center for Dartmouth faculty and students alike. To learn more about the project, or to schedule an appointment to view the objects, please contact the Assistant Curator for Special Projects.
Four of the loan objects are on view in the Hood’s Kim Gallery through May 2012 (see the tile links above). The selection includes an early Christian glass cup depicting the raising of Lazarus (fourth century CE), a grave stele with portrait of a boy from Roman North Africa (third century CE), and two Roman-inspired Egyptian mummy portraits (second century CE). Six of the loans are also currently on display at the entrance to the museum in a student-generated A Space for Dialogue exhibition through August 28, 2011.
Click here to read Yale's press release about the collection-sharing initiative.
Kasia Vincunas '11, Mellon Special Project Curatorial Intern, used some of the Yale loans in her A Space for Dialogue installation titled Faces of Antiquity: Portraiture of the Roman Empire. Click here for a Dartmouth Now article and video feature about her project.
Dartmouth Professor Jeremy Rutter teaching with the Yale objects in Bernstein Study-Storage.
