Exhibitions Archive
Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer refers to the process through which shared beliefs, concepts, customs, and rituals are distributed. This exhibition explores how art mediates the communication of cultural information through specific material practices and visual registers that have their own history: Indigenous Australian dot painting, ledger drawing, performance, photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking.
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.
Pigment of Imagination
Ochre is a family of mineral pigments made from iron oxides and hydroxides, commonly known as rust. Humans have collected ochre for at least 500,000 years, and it underpins the earliest evidence of symbolic culture, and later, figurative art, in the archaeological record. Pigment of Imagination explores the dual identity of ochre––it is both mineral and pigment––and the ways individuals and communities have used it to express complex relationships with the environment. To paint with ochre is to paint with the earth itself; it is a means of embodiment, of putting the land beneath one’s feet and into the storyscapes of cultural knowledge. The works exhibited here––from Africa, Australia, Oceania, and North and South America––reflect the global distribution of ochre and its universal appeal as both material and metaphor. To view these works is to visit the landscape of their creation, to bear witness to place as much as meaning.
Works on Paper, Studies in Contrast
Artists rarely, if ever, remain neutral towards the subjects or themes of their works. They express points of view, opinions, or ideas about the human body, social interactions and hierarchies, politics, faith, the natural world, and even art itself. The works of art in this exhibition, arranged in pairs, offer contrasting perspectives from artists on a variety of themes: men and women, the family, war and human suffering, the built environment, and subjects drawn from poetry and real life. Each pair is accompanied by a single question that serves as a starting point. We wish to provoke further reflection about the artists’ individual approaches to their subjects: from what points of view (literal, emotional, intellectual) does the artist look at their subjects? In what ways do artists communicate their points of view?
This exhibition is curated in conjunction with Art History 2, Introduction to the History of Art II.
Culture and Conflict in Central America
Bolas de FuegoBolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America draws from the Hood Museum’s limited collections to tell stories of communities from the following countries: Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama. Focused on the conflict-laden twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the installation examines turning points in the region’s political and social history, while attending to the themes of race, ethnicity, and migration.
This exhibition was curated in conjunction with LACS 8: Politics and Culture in Transnational Central America and LACS 50.17: Land, Belonging and Social Change in Latin America.
Bolas de Fuego: Cultura y conflicto en América Central se basa en las reducidas colecciones del Museo Hood para contar historias de comunidades provenientes de los siguientes países: Belice, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua y Panamá. Centrada en los siglos XX y XXI los cuales fueron cargados por conflictos bélicos, la instalación examina los puntos de inflexión de la historia política y social en la región con enfoque en los temas de raza, etnia y migración.
Esta exposición fue organizada en conjunto con LACS 8: Política y Cultura en América Central Transnacional y LACS 50.17: Tierra, pertenencia y cambio social en América Latina.
Narratives in Japanese Woodblock Prints
Japanese woodblock-print artists produced numerous rich engagements with culturally resonant narratives that were often loosely based on historical events, then subsequently embellished in textual sources and their theatrical adaptations. The artists featured in this exhibition explore a wide and often gendered range of responses to those narratives’ emotionally charged moral and ethical dilemmas.