Exhibitions Archive
Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity
No Laughing MatterThis fall term, Dartmouth College Humanities Institute participants, including visiting residential fellows and several Dartmouth faculty members, are meeting weekly on campus to investigate the impact of visual humor on history, psychology, culture, and everyday life from multiple perspectives. No Laughing Matter is led by David Bindman (Morton Distinguished Fellow) and Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth Institute Director), under the auspices of the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College, with the participation of the Yale Center for British Art and the Du Bois Institute of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. The Humanities Institute will host an international conference, November 8-11, 2007. The Hood exhibition has also been organized in conjunction with the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting and conference, October 25-28, 2007, which will host a special panel titled Visual Humor in the Global Eighteenth Century in conjunction with the Humanities Institute.
GAWU
El AnatsuiThis inspiring exhibition of metal "tapestries" and other sculptures by El Anatsui, one of Africa's most powerful contemporary artists, celebrates Africa's rich artistic and cultural heritage. El Anatsui uses found objects such as metal liquor caps and other discarded materials to create spectacular metal cloths, including Hovor, which the Hood Museum of Art recently acquired, and two recently completed works that will be exhibited for the first time. The works in this exhibition references broader concerns about the adverse affects of globalization, consumerism, and waste. Organized by the Oriel Mostyn Gallery in North Wales, United Kingdom, this is El Anatsui's first solo exhibition to travel the United States.
The Eyes of Gutete Emerita
Alfredo Jaar
The Eyes of Gutete Emerita by filmmaker and photographer Alfredo Jaar grew out of his visit to Rwanda a few months after the 1994 genocide. This photo-based work, which combines images and text, focuses on the suffering of one individual, Gutete Emerita, who lost her husband and two sons in the mass killing of Tutsis at a church forty miles south of the capital of Kigali. Jaar chose not to photograph the remains of bodies still lying on the ground at the massacre site and instead directs our attention to the survivors who must live with the memory of what they saw. An illustrated brochure accompanies this exhibition.
African Metal Body Adornment
Beauty MarksThe Museum as Hunter and Gatherer
CollectaneaTo collect up to a final limit is not simply to own or to control the items one finds; it is to exercise control over existence itself through possessing every sample, every specimen, every instance of an unrepeatable and nowhere duplicated series.
—Roger Cardinal and John Elsner, The Cultures of Collecting
col·lec·ta·ne·a 1.) Passages, remarks, etc., collected from various sources; (as collect. sing.) a collection of passages, a miscellany. 2.) A selection of passages from one or more authors; an anthology.
This exhibition illuminates the broader social history of the Hood by exploring the diverse "authors" of its collection history and will look at how the museum's collection has been developed and (re)defined over time. Uniting traditional with contemporary and Western with non-Western art via pottery, sculpture, utilitarian objects, textiles, photographs, and prints, col·lec·ta·ne·a explores different collecting practices and ideologies that reflect the museum's unique identity as a hunter and gatherer of material culture. Topics addressed in the exhibition include the role of private collectors in developing museum collections; the continuation of older cultural traditions in newer forms; the relation between museum collections and teaching at Dartmouth; changing perspectives of "art" versus "artifact"; the value of "hybridized" art versus "authentic" art; and the continued development of the Hood's collections in new and interesting ways.