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Methods and Materials

October 4 – November 22, 2025
Art History Now

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  • A photograph of a long and narrow museum gallery with peach walls installed with framed works on the three walls and two cases are on two of the three walls.

    Methods and Materials: Art History Now installed in the Class of 1967 Gallery. Photo by Alison Palizzolo.

About

Every generation remakes art history. As students brush off dusty analytical tools and reanimate enduring cultural questions, the discipline acquires new urgency—and new relevance. This teaching exhibition, mounted in conjunction with an advanced seminar for departmental majors offered in fall 2025, invites students to rethink the methods and materials of their scholarly craft. Rarely shown and understudied, the objects gathered here represent "hidden gems" from the Hood Museum's collection. Together, these unfamiliar images and forms invite us to reflect on issues from racialization to migration. And they encourage us to reconsider art's canonical histories, to see across space and time. Can a contemporary Ethiopian photographic print unsettle our view of an 18th-century British painting? What does a 16th-century German engraving have in common with a modern Native American painting?

This exhibition is curated in conjunction with ARTH 89.05: Art Historical Theory and Method. It is organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Harrington Gallery Fund.

Exhibition Curator

Elizabeth Kassler-Taub