Exhibitions Archive
Seventeenth-Century Art in the Netherlands
The Golden Age
This exhibition showcases seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish paintings and prints from the Hood Museum of Art’s collection. It includes a dramatic seascape, a still life, Biblical subjects, scenes of everyday life, and several portraits by artists including Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Hendrik Goltizus, and Anthony van Dyck. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with Art History Professor Joy Kenseth’s course on Northern Baroque art, which examines painting in Flanders and Holland from 1600 to 1700. These works touch on many of the course’s themes and the students will examine and write papers on selected works throughout the term.
Constructing Black Identities across the African Diaspora
Made in the MiddleCultural anthropology began as the study of people—primarily in Africa—whom Europeans had defined as exotic, primitive, and uncivilized, but many later ethnographic studies debunked this colonial mindset. Today’s anthropologists aim to reveal the social, historical, and political construction of racial identities. The works of art in this small exhibition further this effort. They represent a host of colonial binaries—culture and civilization, traditional and modern, savage and civilized, rest and west, black and white—that often serve to perpetuate systems of inequality rather than understanding of our shared humanity. Taken together, the artists here reveal the difficult positions in which people of color find themselves when trying to simultaneously conform to standards upheld by white western society and recuperate a relationship to Africa or blackness. Yet the images expose not only the potential hurt but also the excitement of crafting hybrid identities from various cultures.
Chelsey Kivland, Robert A. and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow of Anthropology, and Amelia Kahl, Hood Museum of Art Coordinator of Academic Programming, selected these works for Professor Kivland’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class. Students in the class wrote descriptive labels for these works and used them for a visual anthropology assignment.
The Object World
The world is comprised of objects. These discrete items acquire meaning through relationships and context, yet are defined by their own autonomy. To give order to the things that surround us, we create categories, which, in turn, rely upon cultural connotations that impart meaning, value, and significance. The common language of things can convey a multiplicity of ideas such as concerns, class, or interests. The audience interprets the subjects by and through the objects that surround them.
Works of art present a special category as they occupy several object worlds simultaneously. Artworks epitomize Graham Harman’s definition of a “real object” as one that has not an outer effect, but an inner one. The tactility of the object is, of course, present, but the value lies not purely in its physical qualities, but in what it evokes.
This exhibition was curated by Katie Hornstein, assistant professor of Art History, and Jane Carroll, senior lecturer of Art History, in conjunction with their class Introduction to Art History II. Students used these works of art for a writing assignment. This exhibition has been made possible by the Harrington Gallery Fund.
Dartmouth Looks at The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari)
Often called “the world’s first novel,” The Tale of Genji was written in the early eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, the nom de plume of a woman born into the middle ranks of the aristocracy. Its complex development of character and sophisticated representation of moral and aesthetic values have made The Tale of Genji the central canonical text of one of the world’s most important literary traditions.
This exhibition of works from the Japanese collection of the Hood Museum of Art showcases representations of the eleventh-century Tale of Genji and three sequels written in the mid-nineteenth century. A handscroll and folding screen painted during the early to mid-1700s offer a sense of high-culture approaches to the novel. A selection of woodblock prints demonstrates how the novel and its sequels were reworked for popular audiences.
This gallery presents a selection of contemporary and traditional Native American art in conjunction with Vera Palmer’s course Perspectives in Native American Studies. Vera Palmer frequently discusses many of these objects with her students to underscore the multiple forms of expression employed by Native American artists. Many of these works provide an opportunity to explore issues of identity, education, assimilation, and violence.
Manifestations of Inequality
Objects and PowerThe world today is an unequal place where individuals face stark differences in their access to resources, information, and power. The archaeological record suggests that such inequities have existed in various cultures throughout human history. This student-curated installation considers some of the challenges of interpreting and presenting material objects as they relate to inequality. Just as professional archaeologists have built their theories using both ancient artifacts and cultural materials from contemporary populations, the student curators have assembled a diverse collection to consider four domains in which archaeologists can see inequality created, reproduced, and challenged in ancient societies. The central themes—craft goods, daily life, public performance, and mortuary practice—offer interwoven views on the intersecting lives of people and the material objects that they use to communicate status among their families and to other members of society. The objects on display serve as metaphors for understanding the dynamics underlying how different cultures have invented and shaped inequality in its many forms.