Exhibitions Archive
Recent Work by Louise Hamlin
In the MomentThis exhibition celebrates the work of Louise Hamlin, the former George Frederick Jewett professor of studio art and area head of printmaking at Dartmouth. Inspiration can be found in many places. For Louise, inspiration is not found in the grandiose, but rather in the subtle, familiar, and overlooked corners of our everyday world. In each scene, whether a fog-filled landscape or bundle of garlic scapes from the farmstand, Hamlin has explored light and form, creating images that suggest paint (or ink) and color as her driving force.
This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World explores artistic responses to the natural world by diverse American artists working from the early nineteenth century to the present. It is the first major installation of the museum’s historic American collection to be organized thematically, rather than chronologically. More significantly, it features not only Euro-American, African American, Latin American, and Asian American works but also, for the first time, traditional and contemporary Native American works hung alongside this early to contemporary "American" art. This collaboratively curated exhibition of approximately 160 works fills four galleries as it compels us to consider new perspectives on historical and contemporary art by diverse artists, Native and non-Native, and to reflect on our own relationship to place and land. How, for instance, have experiences of home and the natural world changed historically and in our own lifetimes? How have they already been impacted by unanticipated phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic? What actions would help to provide all Americans a secure sense of home, in both the built and the natural environment?
The Tiger Cat
Thornton Dial
In 2021, the Hood Museum of Art acquired ten artworks from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, including the three by Thornton Dial that form Thornton Dial: The Tiger Cat. This exhibition celebrates this acquisition, asking us to look closely at Dial’s work and consider the ways in which it broadens our understanding of American art.
Abstracting Nature
Transcendent LandscapesTranscendent Landscapes: Abstracting Nature explores the environment as a subject in abstract art. Focusing on five monumental works by female painters, this exhibition studies the spiritual role landscapes play in painting and considers the way these works evoke metaphysical experiences for both the artist and the viewer.
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.
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.
my life as a tunnel
Shannon Te Ao
Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa / New Zealander, born Australia, 1978) implements Māori traditions to explore the ambiguities and tensions within interpersonal relationships as well as the complex dynamics between Indigeneity, language, and loss. The starting point for my life as a tunnel (2018) is a scene from Charles Burnett’s iconic film Killer of Sheep (1978) in which the protagonist, Stan, and his wife—whose marriage has experienced much strain—slowly dance to the haunting Clyde Otis song "This Bitter Earth," originally recorded by Dinah Washington in 1959, capturing a pivotal moment of physical and psychological exchange between two individuals. This two-channel video is installed on two separate, back-to-back screens. Two male figures move intimately together to an a cappella version of "This Bitter Earth," translated into te reo Māori (Māori language). Their engagements seem affectionate, but there are subtle, yet palpable, moments of disquiet. This layered and poignant work weaves together past and present and asks: What can be found once something is lost?