Exhibitions Archive
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.
¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. ¡Printing the Revolution! explores the rise of Chicano graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.
More than reflecting the need for social change, the works in this exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking.
Constructing the Ideal Soldier
Who is the ideal soldier? This exhibition explores how artists have constructed the image of the perfect service member, with an emphasis on Mexico and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, artists manufactured the soldier figure with a certain gender, sexual orientation, and patriotic outlook. Ultimately, this exhibition invites visitors to consider how our societal conception of the ideal soldier has, or has not, changed over the past one hundred years.
A Space for Dialogue is a student-curated exhibition program that began in 2001. Hood Museum of Art interns create an installation drawn from the museum's permanent collection by engaging with every aspect of curation, from doing research and selecting objects, to choosing frames and a wall color, to planning a layout and writing labels and a brochure, to giving a public talk. There have been over 100 A Space for Dialogue exhibitions on a wide variety of themes.
Femme Queer Gender Performance in Photography
Femme is Fierce
This exhibition celebrates various ways that femme performance is depicted in photography. The subjects of these photos embrace femme as an aspect of their self-representation across genders, queer orientations, races, ethnicities, and time. The exhibition includes photography by Laura Aguilar, Andy Warhol, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, and others. The joyous approach of Femme Is Fierce affirms that femme is not a display of fragility, but a performance of a person’s right to use gender signifiers deemed feminine to their own ends, and to radically state that strength is not only found in the masculine.