Exhibitions Archive

This exhibition showcases seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish paintings and prints from the Hood Museum of Art’s collection. It includes a dramatic seascape, a still life, Biblical subjects, scenes of everyday life, and several portraits by artists including Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Hendrik Goltizus, and Anthony van Dyck. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with Art History Professor Joy Kenseth’s course on Northern Baroque art, which examines painting in Flanders and Holland from 1600 to 1700. These works touch on many of the course’s themes and the students will examine and write papers on selected works throughout the term.

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When encountering the tortured soul, one is forced to confront aspects of the human experience that are often easier to ignore. The tragedies of human folly frequently appear in literature and have captured the attention of a variety of people, including artists. Often the aberrant behavior of a troubled individual comes as the result of excess, whether it is lust for power, greed, love, or some emotion that is felt so intensely that the pull is irresistible, regardless of consequences. As artists depict these struggles, the relationship between the rational and irrational comes into play. Questions arise about the role of imagination and creativity in the face of fact and logic. Both imagination and reason have much to offer; yet both can be dangerous. The works of art featured in The Tortured Soul represent the darker aspects of humanity described in literature in order to reveal continuities with contemporary life.

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Allan Houser (1914–1994) was a noted American sculptor, painter, and draftsman and one of the major figures in Native American art of the twentieth century. He often drew on his Chiricahua Apache heritage when making sculptures that depict the Native American people of the Southwest. A versatile artist, he also created modernist abstract sculptures and worked in a variety of media including bronze, stone, and steel. Dartmouth College and the Hood Museum of Art celebrate the centennial of his birth with an installation of five major sculptural works in the Maffei Arts Plaza and Hood gateway, as well as a fall 2014 exhibition of drawings in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center.

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Emblem, type, symbol, token, trope, image, sign—all of these words describe specific visual forms that represent abstract ideas through recognized shapes, colors, and figures. Many emblems contain culturally specific messages, often taken from sacred or ancient texts, the meanings of which evolve over time. Since these images are quickly legible to members of a shared culture, artists mobilize emblems to provoke certain reactions in an audience. This exhibition draws together various types of emblematic prints—primarily woodcuts—that address social problems and issues.

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The realm of Poseidon encompassed virtually every aspect of life in the ancient Mediterranean world, from mythology and cult to daily activities. This exhibition explores each of his dominions through more than one hundred works of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art produced between 800 BCE and 400 CE. Visitors will see striking black-figure and red-figure pottery, alongside sculptures in terracotta, marble, and precious metals, and extraordinary examples of ancient glass, mosaics, carved gems, and coins, all providing a rich picture of life in the ancient world. Poseidon and the Sea offers an intimate look not only at the mysteries of the ancient world, but also at the timeless beauty and wonder of the sea that continues to resonate with us in the present day.

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Cultural anthropology began as the study of people—primarily in Africa—whom Europeans had defined as exotic, primitive, and uncivilized, but many later ethnographic studies debunked this colonial mindset. Today’s anthropologists aim to reveal the social, historical, and political construction of racial identities. The works of art in this small exhibition further this effort. They represent a host of colonial binaries—culture and civilization, traditional and modern, savage and civilized, rest and west, black and white—that often serve to perpetuate systems of inequality rather than understanding of our shared humanity. Taken together, the artists here reveal the difficult positions in which people of color find themselves when trying to simultaneously conform to standards upheld by white western society and recuperate a relationship to Africa or blackness. Yet the images expose not only the potential hurt but also the excitement of crafting hybrid identities from various cultures.

Chelsey Kivland, Robert A. and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow of Anthropology, and Amelia Kahl, Hood Museum of Art Coordinator of Academic Programming, selected these works for Professor Kivland’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class. Students in the class wrote descriptive labels for these works and used them for a visual anthropology assignment.

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