Exhibitions Archive
Tracing Foodways through Art
From the Field
From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art explores the idea of food as not only nourishment but also an expression of our lived and shared experiences. This exhibition invites audiences to reflect on their relationships to foodways, which encompass our attitudes, practices, and rituals around food. Artworks across different time periods, mediums, and cultures illustrate points of connection, disconnection, and reconnection to our foodways.
Shaping a Collection
An Instant Out of Time
An Instant Out of Time: Shaping a Collection looks at how the Hood Museum’s photography holdings are being developed to best respond to the institution’s teaching mission. It celebrates the collection’s four areas of strength—social documentary, contemporary, portraiture, and landscape photography—and considers future directions for this important campus asset.
Emphasizing the role of women artists and feminine aesthetics in crafting African and African diaspora art histories, this exhibition surveys themes of home, kinship, motherhood, femininity, and intimacy in both historic and contemporary works. Homecoming breaks free of the binary traditional/contemporary to instead dwell at the interstices of history, futurity, and spirituality over the past two centuries.
Ga Bose Gangwe
Mohau Modisakeng
After dark, people passing the Hood Museum are able to experience a video work, Ga Bose Gangwe, by the South African artist Mohau Modisakeng. This graceful expression of resilience and determination is on display in the vitrine window above the north entrance to the museum until July 1, 2023. The title of the video comes from a Setswana (a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa) proverb, phiri o rile ga bo se gangwe, that translates to “better luck next time” or “do again" or "try again.” Using the movements of a group of Black male dancers as metaphor, Modisakeng reflects on how the specter of colonialism weighs down the aspirations of post-apartheid South Africa and other post-colonial countries.
A Focus on Africa
Global Contemporary
Global contemporary art encapsulates the practices of Western and non-Western artists alike who emobdy the spirit of the time. This installation presents a contemporary story of the continent of Africa through fifteen powerful works in diverse media and in myriad forms by multiple generations of artists. The works explore a range of issues, including the impact of the colonial past on present challenges of nation-building in Africa, feminism, urbanism and infrastructural changes, globalization, forced and voluntary immigration, and environmental challenges.
Works from the Continent of Africa
This installation presents the ways in which the aesthetic values and worldviews of different African socities in the past are still relevant to the contemporary social imaginary of the vast majority of people in Africa. Whereas some museums continue to treat canonical African art as vectors of source cultures, this installation emphasizes the individual autonomy of the objects on view. The selection is organized around six themes: Figures, Parliament of Masks, Power Objects, Transitions, Art of Small Things, and Art of Everyday.