Hood Quarterly, spring/summer 2011
Egyptian Art at the Museum
Christine Lilyquist, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's former head of the Department of Egyptian Art and Lila Acheson Wallace Research Curator in Egyptology, has served as advisor and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Hood over the past few years as she has researched and cataloged the museum's collection of ancient Egyptian objects. During her career at the Met, Dr. Lilyquist directed the reinstallation of the museum's Egyptian collections, supervised the installation of one of the museum's stellar attractions, the monumental Temple of Dendur, and curated the overwhelmingly popular special exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun in the 1970s.
Egyptian Antiquities at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art will present aspects of her extensive research on these objects and their insights into life in ancient Egypt. The antiquities on view range from temple sculpture to funerary items, including a painted textile shroud with spells from the Book of the Dead dating to the New Kingdom (1600–1250 BCE) and a painted sandstone face assigned to the pharaoh Mentuhotep III (2000–1988 BCE). Most objects are on public view for the first time.
Collection-Sharing Initiative with Yale University Art Gallery
The Hood has embarked upon a program of significant loans and shared expertise funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Initiated by the Yale University Art Gallery, this collection-sharing project is intended to foster intra- and inter-institutional collaboration and expand opportunities for 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 program was created based on the belief that, while technologies have increased access to museum collections, there is no substitute for original works of art.
In December 2010 the Hood borrowed forty-six ancient Mediterranean objects from Yale for a two-year period. Dartmouth faculty and students from a range of disciplines including art history, classics, religion, and history will use 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 produce a website and documentary film.
Related Exhibitions
- Egyptian Antiquities at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art
- Investigations into the Ancient Mediterranean
- Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life