Exhibitions Archive
Shaping a Collection
An Instant Out of Time
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.
Relaxation and Resistance
And I'm Feeling Good
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.
The Great Mystery
Kent Monkman
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.
U.S. Abstraction since 1950
The Painter's Hand
For abstract painters, such as Louise Fishman and Robert Motherwell, the action of creating a brushstroke itself has a singular importance, reinforcing their individuality. Often referred to as “gestural,” these works track the movements of the artists’ hand, arms, and even bodies in the creation of imagery that favors invisible concerns such as emotion, spirituality, and the metaphysics of existence. At the same time, there have been artists who seek to downplay or eliminate all traces of their own gestures—Ellsworth Kelly and Deborah Remington—to others utilizing techniques that involve pouring, dripping, or splashing pigment onto their canvases—notably Helen Frankenthaler and Pat Steir. Taken together, these Hood Museum collection favorites suggest the continued vitality of painting and abstraction.
Historical Imaginary
Historical Imaginary pairs an unfinished study for Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware with historical and contemporary artworks from the Hood Museum’s collection to explore how artists—literally—constructed ideas about US history. This exhibition questions how artworks shaped, and continue to shape, our perception of the past, in the hopes that we can build upon our shared, complex, and sometimes violent history to imagine and create a more equitable future.
Margaret Bourke-White, World War II, and Life Magazine
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971) was one of the first photographers that Life magazine sent to Europe to cover World War II. The images she sent back filled endless pages of the magazine; Americans were riveted; and sales skyrocketed. This exhibition is drawn entirely from a unique portfolio of her photographs created near the end of the war.