Exhibitions Archive
Nineteenth-Century European Sculpture
Emulating Antiquity
Powerful ancient goddesses and heroic warriors populate this gallery of French, British, and American sculpture from the 19th century. Accompanied by Lawrence Alma Tadema's monumental painting The Sculpture Gallery from the mid-1870s—a treatise on the legacy of ancient Greek and Roman art—the works testify to the prominent place of figural sculpture at this time. The lenses through which we view this art have shifted in the last thirty years, prompting the exploration of themes from homoeroticism and sexuality to changing aesthetic ideals.
Cubism and Its Aftershocks
For the United States, modernism in the first half of the 20th century emerged from a transatlantic dialogue among artists, writers, philosophers, and myrid other forward-looking thinkers. This gallery focuses on the exchange of ideas between art centers such as Paris and New York while celebrating the contributions of individual artists.
Black Bodies on the Cross
Black Bodies on the Cross attempts to capture the dissonance and duality present in the Black Christian experience, as seen through the eyes of postwar and contemporary African American artists including Romare Bearden, Ashley Bryan, Kara Walker, and Enrico Riley. By inserting Black subjects into Biblical narratives, these artists explore the ways in which the Black experience can be understood as part of a universalizing Christian narrative that, ironically, often excludes Black subjects.
Recycle, Resist, Protect, Sustain
Native Ecologies
What do you see and what can you understand when you look at a piece of Native pottery made in the late 19th century? In this gallery, we'll ask what we might see and understand of Native and social ecologies when we look in, under, and outside the drawing, carving, tool, ceremonial object, and item of clothing—that is, Native relationships with and responsibilities to place, land, water, plants, and animals, and to family, community, and stranger.
The Sepik River and Abelam Hill Country
Melanesian Art
The art of Melanesia is a particular strength of the Hood Museum of Art's collection, and the museum's primary holdings are from the island of New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific. The objects in this gallery offer a window into the region's traditional religions, people's ideas about the supernatural world, and the social relationships of people living within the traditional societies located in the Sepik River region and Abelam Hills in the northern part of the island.
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.