Exhibitions Archive
Points of View
The works of art in this exhibition, arranged in pairs, offer contrasting positions by artists on a variety of themes: men and women, the family, war and human suffering, landscapes and seascapes, images of others and of the self. Each pair is accompanied by a single question intended to provoke further questions about the artists’ individual approaches to their subjects: From what points of view (literal, emotional, intellectual) does the artist look at his/her subject? Is the artist’s stance celebratory? honorific? critical? a form of protest? In what ways does the artist communicate this to the beholder? Art history professors Joy Kenseth and Mary Coffey curated this exhibition in conjunction with their course Introduction to the History of Art II, a survey of art and architecture from 1500 to the present.
Twentieth-Century Inuit Art from the Collection of the Hood Museum of Art
Tradition and TransformationThe majority of artists in this installation represent a generation of Inuit from the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada who lived fully “on the land.” Several changes occurred during the mid-twentieth century that pressured the Inuit to change their traditional life ways by moving into settlements. Although the Inuit had been trading works they made out of a variety of materials since the time of contact, new visitors encouraged them to use their knowledge and skills to create work—in stone, fabric, drawings, and on paper—that would be oriented for a non-Inuit art market.
The majority of works in this installation were made by the first generation of Inuit artists to exhibit and sell their work to new markets in the south through art dealers and cooperatives. The objects they produced are remarkable works of art, widely sought after by collectors, and now in the collections of major museums all over the world. Most importantly, the production of this work created a vehicle for preserving cultural knowledge and sustaining tradition while innovating and creating new forms of expression.
The City as Memory Machine
Life in the city is lived in daily patterns of mobility. Each day, most of us stroll past the same shops and cafés, or distractedly gaze across receding rooftops from the vantage of an elevated train. We often think of time spent in transit as lost time, life on the periphery of real living. But as the French anthropologist Marc Augé has shown us, traveling through the city is a practice of history and memory. Instead of life lost, cities unfold at the stop-and-go pace of a crowded bus line. Along the way, monuments to the city’s collective history spark personal, individualized memories. In those fleeting moments, as the bus rolls along, we may be struck by the memory of a childhood trip to Central Park or suddenly recall a moment of heartbreaking loss. On the commute, the past and the present intermingle in barely recognized flashes of illumination, all in the time it takes to glance up from the morning newspaper.
Tension and Flow
Water Ways
Water is essential to human life, shaping the geography of human settlement, modes of travel, and ease of trade. Too much water (flooding) or too little (drought) has wrought havoc in communities for millennia. This exhibition considers humans' relationship to water, from the architecture of socialization pictured in Edward Burtynsky's photograph of a stepwell in India to the dramatic effects of flooding shown in images of people in front of their homes from Gideon Mendel's series Drowning World. From quiet still lifes (David Goldes) to panoramic landscapes (Ian Teh), these photographs showcase the beauty and power of this miraculous, yet quotidian, substance.
Self-Portraiture in Contemporary Art
About FaceOrganized in collaboration with Studio Art majors from Dartmouth's Class of 2015, this exhibition explores the continued relevance and global diversity of self-portraiture in contemporary art. While self-portraiture has traditionally engaged with direct observation and autobiography, contemporary artists have begun to question the value and integrity of authorship and a coherent artistic identity through the use of disguise, impersonation, and assumed personae.
About Face explores the various approaches that contemporary artists have used to investigate identity as a culturally constructed phenomenon and will include works by such notable practitioners as Chuck Close, Susanna Coffey, Rineke Dijkstra, Marit Følstad, Nikki S. Lee, Sarah McEneaney, Nomusa Makhubu, Bruce Nauman, Wendy Red Star, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Christian Thompson, and Jeff Wall.
Sources of Abstraction
Gesture, Emotion, ShapeAbstraction comes from many different sources. It may begin with a concrete object, or something less tangible, such as an emotion or thought. Artists use abstraction to express that which cannot be conveyed through representation and to explore other sources of art-making. The works in the exhibition date from immediately after World War II until the present. Some were strongly influenced by abstract expressionism, and others stem from later movements, such as minimalism and conceptualism. This exhibition highlights three important sources of abstraction: gesture, emotion, and shape.
This exhibition was curated by Philip Dytko, Class of 2017, Pauline Lewis, Class of 2016, and Molly Siegel, Class of 2016, each of whom was enrolled in Professor Mary Coffey’s ARTH 71: The American Century. This course provides a thematic overview of American art in the twentieth century. Students in the class were placed into curatorial teams of three, and each team identified a theme, selected six objects from the permanent collection, drafted labels, and proposed an installation design for the exhibition. The teams presented their proposals to the entire class at the end of the term, and students voted on their favorite. Gesture, Emotion, Shape: Sources of Abstraction was the winning exhibition.