Exhibitions Archive

A DREAM Deferred: Undocumented Immigrants and the American Dream explores works of art that call attention to undocumented immigrants, whose livelihoods are in constant danger as they continue to live in the United States in hopes of better opportunities and to achieve the so-called American Dream. This exhibition focuses primarily on poster prints, which have become a popular and effective tool for spreading the word on injustices and reaching mass audiences.

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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Los Mojados: Migrant Bodies and Latinx Identities highlights prints and photographs from the Hood’s collection that speak to the complexity of the US-Latinx experience. Ranging from migrant labor rights issues in the 1960s to the current Central American refugee crisis, these works explore an array of cross-cultural issues though an exploration of the body and accessible media. This exhibition seeks to insert Latinx art and culture into the greater historical narrative of the United States while encouraging viewers to rethink the boundaries of American art.

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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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This installation investigates the Virgin as a trope and looks at some of the ways in which artists manipulate her to evoke personal piety in both religious and secular contexts that transcend particular cultures. It includes four works--a painting on steel, a photograph, a terracotta jar, and a color lithograph--all created in the twentieth century by artists from the Americas. Produced in different cultures and at different times, these objects present distinctive iterations and interpretations of the Virgin Mary as an object of art and devotion.

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In 1936, Jackson Pollock traveled to Dartmouth College to view José Clemente Orozco's monumental fresco The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34). The deep impact that Orozco's imagery had on the young Pollock is demonstrated in this revelatory exhibition, which brings together for the first time the drawings and paintings of two of the most famous artists of the twentieth century.

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Colorful, playful, and visually enticing, the appliquéd molas that Kuna women sew onto their blouses yield an astounding array of traditional and contemporary themes. These stitched cloth panels feature abstract and figurative motifs derived from Kuna legends and culture, political posters, labels, books, the natural world, mass media and popular culture, cartoons, and everyday life. Having initially developed from pre-Hispanic body arts, mola making in Kuna Yala, an archipelago that runs along the Caribbean coast of Panama, has become an important women’s economic enterprise that also preserves Kuna cultural and ethnic identity.

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