Exhibitions Archive
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.
The Legacy of Conversion and Commerce in the Early Modern World
Faith and Empire
This exhibition is organized by the students of ARTH 20.04, "Faith and Empire: Art in the Early Modern World," taught by Elizabeth Rice Mattison, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art. It examines the relationship between colonialism and religion between 1550 and 1750, especially in the Dutch and Spanish global empires. Drawn from new research completed by the students on the Hood Museum’s collection, it also revisits histories of enslavement, diplomacy between nations, and exemplary craftsmanship.
Images of Violence, 1500–1900
Recording War
While many images of battle celebrate glorious victories or acts of bravery, other representations record instances of trauma and suffering. This exhibition brings together depictions of conflict that focus attention on the human effects of war, especially on civilians. Featuring selections from Francisco de Goya’s famous series, Disasters of War, in the context of prints and drawings made by European artists between 1500 and 1900, this exhibition examines how such images present critical historical evidence of the human experiences of violence.
Femme Queer Gender Performance in Photography
Femme is Fierce
This exhibition celebrates various ways that femme performance is depicted in photography. The subjects of these photos embrace femme as an aspect of their self-representation across genders, queer orientations, races, ethnicities, and time. The exhibition includes photography by Laura Aguilar, Andy Warhol, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, and others. The joyous approach of Femme Is Fierce affirms that femme is not a display of fragility, but a performance of a person’s right to use gender signifiers deemed feminine to their own ends, and to radically state that strength is not only found in the masculine.
The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection
A Legacy for LearningA Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection comprises a series of exhibitions that individually and collectively celebrate the Bernstein family's gifts to the collection of the Hood Museum of Art over four decades. These shows present photography, paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by European, Japanese, and North American artists.
In spring and summer 2021, the museum features the Bernstein Collection installations Pinpricks and Pomposity: The Inventiveness of English Visual Satire, Landscape(d): Modern Photography and the Environment, and Lyrical Journey: Toko Shinoda.
In August 2021, the installations change over to Inuit Art | Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Both Sides of the Lens: Portrait Photography, and Mystic Peak: Selections from the Bernstein Collection of Japanese Art, through January 2022.
Society Engraved
The prints in this exhibition reflect William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) pointed, shrewd, and satirical social and political commentary. His work appealed to a broad public, but this popularity prompted questions into the ethical issues around the production and distribution of prints, the right to profit from artistic labor, and the nature of what constitutes an original work of art.