Exhibitions Archive

Playing upon the dual definitions of liquidity—liquid assets bought and sold, as well as liquid substances—this exhibition mines the historical connections between art, water, and commodities. Highlights from the Hood Museum’s American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts collection explore histories of global trade across water; linkages between water and tourism; liquids as artistic materials; and how nineteenth-century water pollution and historical access to clean water remain relevant to local and national discussions in our present moment.

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[Un]Mapping examines the legacies of mapmaking and invites viewers to think about alternatives for visualizing our relationships to place. This show focuses on the work of artists whose practices critique colonial legacies of cartography and employ decolonial and Indigenous ways of knowing. It considers how maps can be used not in the interests of surveillance or dispossession but as a means of placemaking.

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From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art explores the idea of food as not only nourishment but also an expression of our lived and shared experiences. This exhibition invites audiences to reflect on their relationships to foodways, which encompass our attitudes, practices, and rituals around food. Artworks across different time periods, mediums, and cultures illustrate points of connection, disconnection, and reconnection to our foodways.

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An Instant Out of Time: Shaping a Collection looks at how the Hood Museum’s photography holdings are being developed to best respond to the institution’s teaching mission. It celebrates the collection’s four areas of strength—social documentary, contemporary, portraiture, and landscape photography—and considers future directions for this important campus asset.

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Featuring selections from the Hood Museum's photography collection, And I’m Feeling Good: Relaxation and Resistance celebrates joy in African American life. Simultaneously, it considers the pleasures and challenges in achieving and maintaining that “good feeling” in the United States.

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Featuring a new body of paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman—including two commissioned works for the Hood Museum of Art’s permanent collections—The Great Mystery serves as both an introduction to and a revisitation of Monkman’s early interest in abstract expressionism. Drawing on the museum's existing collection of modernist abstraction, Monkman's paintings create pathways for multiple and shared understandings across cultural divides and are unlike anything we have seen from him before.

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