Exhibitions Archive
Successive African art curators at the Hood Museum of Art have assembled an extraordinary and holistic vision of the arts of Africa that encompasses both important historical milestones and the multiple cultural and social vistas of this continent. Acquired over the past two years and on view together for the first time, these thirty-one exceptional objects map the contour of modern and contemporary African art from the 1960s to the present while also shedding critical light on the diversity of African artistic practices by multiple generations of artists. The installation includes an exciting array of paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, ceramic, and mixed media, including works by Ibrahim El Salahi, Lamidi Fakeye, Akin Fakeye, Owusu-Ankomah, Victor Ekpuk, Chike Obeagu, Candice Breitz, Nomusa Makhubu, Julien Sinzogan, Aida Muluneh, Halida Boughriet, Mario Macilau, Eric van Hove, Khulumeleni Magwaza, and Nidhal Chamekh.
Ice Cuts
Eric Aho
Vermont-based artist Eric Aho’s series of Ice Cuts paintings is inspired by the hole cut in the ice in front of a Finnish sauna, an aspect of Finnish culture that Aho’s family has maintained to this day. Intended for an icy immersion following the heat of the sauna, the avanto, as it is called in Finnish, underscores and personalizes the inherent contrasts in nature. Aho began the Ice Cuts series nine years ago, making one painting a year of the dark void produced by the act of sawing into the thick ice. This exhibition is the first to concentrate on the Ice Cuts paintings he has created to date. The central abstract form in these compositions provides the structure for experimentation with paint texture, surface, and subtly nuanced color, lending these frozen scenes both an austere beauty and a particular vibrancy. This exhibition brings together the major paintings in the series to date and smaller, related works on paper to offer unique insight into the artistic process.
Works from the Hood Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection
Contemporary Abstraction
This exhibition features paintings by both American and Indigenous Australian artists and reveals the strength of the Hood’s contemporary holdings, including a selection of recent acquisitions with new work by Pat Steir, Colleen Randall, and Brenda Garand.
Photographs by James Nachtwey and Kevin Bubriski
The 2015 Nepal Earthquake
In the spring of 2015, just days after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook Gorkha District and surrounding areas in Nepal, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 documented the immediate aftermath among these devastated communities, both in urban centers and in mountain villages only accessible by helicopter. Six weeks later, photographer Kevin Bubriski arrived in Kathmandu and captured the rebuilding of a city and the resilience of its people. A few of those images by each photographer are on view in this exhibition.
(Re)Imagining Home
Home is a complex idea imbued with a variety of meanings and associations. This exhibition explores home as a mutable emotional and conceptual phenomenon inextricably linked to physical spaces. Home is constantly (re)imagined, subject to continual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction both materially and in the mind. Homes are highly personalized spaces that represent personal narratives and inner lives and continually evolve as their inhabitants age or move. Whether actual or staged, physical or imagined, idyllic or in ruins, images of homes raise the questions: Where is home? What is home? Does (or can) home travel with you or is it something forever left behind?
Trevor Fairbrother, John T. Kirk, and the Hood Museum of Art
Collecting and Sharing
This exhibition features the collection of Trevor Fairbrother, an independent curator, and John T. Kirk, a scholar of early American decorative arts, who have donated important works in their collection to the museum. Emphasizing the Hood’s teaching mission, this exhibition is thematically organized and each section displays one work from the museum’s collection alongside those of the donors. These themes include Histories, Wonders, Goods, Marks, Geometries, Males, and Surfaces. The exhibition will showcase paintings, drawings, and sculpture alongside early American furniture and include works by Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Marsden Hartley, Mike Kelley, Sol Lewitt, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Elizabeth Peyton, John Singer Sargent, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Wilson, and many others.