Exhibitions Archive
Word and Image
Organized in collaboration with twenty-two Studio Art Majors from the Class of 2013, this exhibition celebrates the dynamic dialogue and complex interactions between art and language in contemporary art. Adopting a historical perspective to understand current innovations, Word and Image presents key examples of paintings, sculpture, video, photography and other works on paper by a wide range of artists, including Gerald Auten, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Heyman, Faith Ringgold, Ed Ruscha, Nancy Spero, and Fred Wilson. The word-imbued artworks on display reveal the strange, unsettling, and often humorous and subversive results when words escape from their traditional confines and begin to infiltrate the visual arts.
Recent Acquisitions
Japanese Prints in the Hood Museum of ArtThe fifteen prints in this gallery represent the Hood Museum of Art’s ongoing efforts to develop its collection of Japanese woodblock prints as a teaching resource. With publication dates ranging from the 1750s through the 1930s, these prints document several aspects of Japan’s woodblock print culture. This selection features prints in a wide variety of formats representing major print genres including kabuki actor prints (yakusha-e), pictures of fashionable women (bijinga), perspective prints (uki-e), landscape prints (fūkeiga), warrior prints (musha-e), pictures of foreigners residing in Yokohama (Yokohama-e), prints depicting Japan’s late-nineteenth-century modernization (kaika-e), and early-twentieth-century prints (shin hanga).
The Expanding Grid
This exhibition explores the important legacy of cubism and other forms of grid-based abstraction for contemporary artistic expression. The structural underpinnings of the pioneering works of art that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque made in the 1910s allowed them to negate the perspectival illusionism of naturalistic representation. Subsequent artists, such as Josef Albers and Mark Rothko, refined and developed the grid-like scaffolding of cubism to produce an austere and rather impersonal form of abstract art, in which flatness and order were of paramount importance. By the 1960s, however, a new generation of artists, including Chuck Close and Eva Hesse, began to negatively associate the rigid geometry of modernist abstraction with male dominance and political authoritarianism. These artists expanded and, in some cases, exploded the modernist grid to create works of art that embraced political content, figuration, narrative, and subjectivity. As this exhibition shows, contemporary artists continue to explore the temporal and spatial possibilities of grid-based art in works of art that challenge and revitalize the invented language of abstraction.
Investigations into the Ancient Mediterranean
This exhibition explores how the close observation of works of art can reveal connections to wider cultural, religious, political, and social themes. It is part of an innovative collection-sharing initiative created to highlight the importance of teaching with original works of art as part of the college curriculum. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this program enabled Yale University Art Gallery to lend forty-seven ancient Mediterranean objects to the Hood for a two-year period. Over the course of this past year and a half, Dartmouth faculty and students from a range of disciplines including art history, classical archaeology, and history have used both the Yale loans and works from the Hood's collection to explore current discourses on such topics as gender systems, representation and identity, and center and periphery in the Roman Empire.
By working closely with faculty and students to document these projects, the Hood wishes to highlight this major part of its daily activities as a teaching museum and make visible its work with undergraduate students, most of which happens "behind the scenes" in the Bernstein Study-Storage Center.
The Caricature of Honoré Daumier
France in Transformation
One of the most witty and adept caricaturists of all time, Honoré Daumier created a body of social and political cartoons that continues to resonate today. The Hood Museum of Art’s collection offers a rich overview of Daumier’s career as a graphic artist, presenting a picture of France at a time in the mid-nineteenth century when cultural and societal changes were ushering in a new era of modernity.
A History of Viewing from the Renaissance to the Present Day
The Art of Spectatorship
This companion to the course Introduction to Art History II focused on five topics- devotional images, artistic presence in a work of art, voyeurism and the female nude, portrayals of social class and conflict, and artistic quotation and appropriation-surrounding the changing experience of viewing art from the Renaissance to the present day. Images such as Saint Veronica's Sudarium (about sixteenth century), which presents the miraculous transference of Christ's image to Veronica's handkerchief upon route to the crucifixion, appeared alongside Dana Salvo's Mendoza Household Shrine (about 1995), a photograph of a homemade altar with plastic fruits and artificial lights. Other groupings included images of nude classical goddesses and Reginald Marsh's mid-twentieth-century tempera paintings of a New Jersey striptease. Depictions of class convergence in city streets by artists ranging from Honore Daumier to John Sloan further explored the exhibition's themes.