Exhibitions Archive

Drawn from the Hood Museum's permanent collection, Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined features artworks created after 1950 using a range of artistic processes, including assemblage, printmaking, painting, and ceramic and wood sculpture. The exhibition invites personal, immersive exploration through a creative writing space, an opt-in scent station, and original poems by local poets commissioned specifically for this exhibition.

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This installation features highlights of the museum's European holdings in a range of media and genres. Often created to valorize, moralize, or inspire, the works originally appeared in a range of venues, from public institutions to private homes to religious buildings.

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Playing upon the dual definitions of liquidity—liquid assets bought and sold, as well as liquid substances—this exhibition mines the historical connections between art, water, and commodities. Highlights from the Hood Museum’s American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts collection explore histories of global trade across water; linkages between water and tourism; liquids as artistic materials; and how nineteenth-century water pollution and historical access to clean water remain relevant to local and national discussions in our present moment.

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[Un]Mapping examines the legacies of mapmaking and invites viewers to think about alternatives for visualizing our relationships to place. This show focuses on the work of artists whose practices critique colonial legacies of cartography and employ decolonial and Indigenous ways of knowing. It considers how maps can be used not in the interests of surveillance or dispossession but as a means of placemaking.

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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.

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Faces of Faith presents a focused look at a group of artists who engage in diverse forms of the Islamic visual tradition from the 11th century to the present. It begins with Quranic scriptures, calligraphy, and geometric patterning, modes that have long occupied a defining position in historical Islamic art. This is juxtaposed with photography and contemporary art prints that focus on the individual experience. This exhibition demonstrates that Islam is not a monolithic culture but a dynamic and rich faith.

What is Islamic art? What is the role of individual identity in the face of the universal principles of Islam? Faces of Faith argues for a complex response to these questions. Themes like gender and diaspora have long shaped feelings of identity and belonging. By engaging in these themes within the Islamic visual tradition, these artists both capture and contribute to the beauty and diversity of Muslim identity. Viewers are invited to explore the interconnected and enduring themes of resilience, empowerment, identity, and spirituality that infuse Islamic art.

A Space for Dialogue is a student-curated exhibition program that began in 2001. Hood Museum of Art interns create an installation drawn from the museum's permanent collection by engaging with every aspect of curation, from doing research and selecting objects, to choosing frames and a wall color, to planning a layout and writing labels and a brochure, to giving a public talk. There have been over 100 A Space for Dialogue exhibitions on a wide variety of themes.

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