Exhibitions Archive
Across time and cultures, gold has served as a metaphor for what we value most. Symbolically, it stands in for goodness, excellence, brilliance, and wealth. Specifically, the artists represented in this traveling exhibition turn to gilding as a means to reconsider our value systems. Gilding images of graffiti and sidewalks, cardboard boxes and architectural fragments, they ask us to see the beauty in what we so often overlook and honor that which we so often throw away. If, as the saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold,” the artists represented here offer an inverse proposition: perhaps that which does not always shine is most worthy of our attention.
Relaxation and Resistance
And I'm Feeling Good
Featuring selections from the Hood Museum's photography collection, And I’m Feeling Good: Relaxation and Resistance celebrates joy in African American life. Simultaneously, it considers the pleasures and challenges in achieving and maintaining that “good feeling” in the United States.
The Great Mystery
Kent Monkman
Featuring a new body of paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman—including two commissioned works for the Hood Museum of Art’s permanent collections—The Great Mystery serves as both an introduction to and a revisitation of Monkman’s early interest in abstract expressionism. Drawing on the museum's existing collection of modernist abstraction, Monkman's paintings create pathways for multiple and shared understandings across cultural divides and are unlike anything we have seen from him before.
U.S. Abstraction since 1950
The Painter's Hand
For abstract painters, such as Louise Fishman and Robert Motherwell, the action of creating a brushstroke itself has a singular importance, reinforcing their individuality. Often referred to as “gestural,” these works track the movements of the artists’ hand, arms, and even bodies in the creation of imagery that favors invisible concerns such as emotion, spirituality, and the metaphysics of existence. At the same time, there have been artists who seek to downplay or eliminate all traces of their own gestures—Ellsworth Kelly and Deborah Remington—to others utilizing techniques that involve pouring, dripping, or splashing pigment onto their canvases—notably Helen Frankenthaler and Pat Steir. Taken together, these Hood Museum collection favorites suggest the continued vitality of painting and abstraction.
Ga Bose Gangwe
Mohau Modisakeng
After dark, people passing the Hood Museum are able to experience a video work, Ga Bose Gangwe, by the South African artist Mohau Modisakeng. This graceful expression of resilience and determination is on display in the vitrine window above the north entrance to the museum until July 1, 2023. The title of the video comes from a Setswana (a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa) proverb, phiri o rile ga bo se gangwe, that translates to “better luck next time” or “do again" or "try again.” Using the movements of a group of Black male dancers as metaphor, Modisakeng reflects on how the specter of colonialism weighs down the aspirations of post-apartheid South Africa and other post-colonial countries.
Ink Reimagined
Park Dae SungInk Reimagined is a groundbreaking solo exhibition of contemporary Korean ink painter Park Dae Sung’s works. Park, who lost an arm during the tumultuous pre-Korean War period, is a self-taught artist who saw nature as his teacher and thus traveled widely, finding inspiration in China, Taiwan, New York City, and the mountains of North Korea. Featuring paintings of enormous scale and refined technique, Park’s ongoing contemplation of ancient landscapes and objects asks the viewer to rethink modernity via tradition and gain a fresh appreciation for the diversity of styles—from dramatic to meditative to bursting with movement—possible through ink and brush. Due to popular demand, two of the three galleries in the exhibition will remain on view through May 20!