Exhibitions Archive
¡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.
Recent Work by Louise Hamlin
In the MomentThis exhibition celebrates the work of Louise Hamlin, the former George Frederick Jewett professor of studio art and area head of printmaking at Dartmouth. Inspiration can be found in many places. For Louise, inspiration is not found in the grandiose, but rather in the subtle, familiar, and overlooked corners of our everyday world. In each scene, whether a fog-filled landscape or bundle of garlic scapes from the farmstand, Hamlin has explored light and form, creating images that suggest paint (or ink) and color as her driving force.
This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World explores artistic responses to the natural world by diverse American artists working from the early nineteenth century to the present. It is the first major installation of the museum’s historic American collection to be organized thematically, rather than chronologically. More significantly, it features not only Euro-American, African American, Latin American, and Asian American works but also, for the first time, traditional and contemporary Native American works hung alongside this early to contemporary "American" art. This collaboratively curated exhibition of approximately 160 works fills four galleries as it compels us to consider new perspectives on historical and contemporary art by diverse artists, Native and non-Native, and to reflect on our own relationship to place and land. How, for instance, have experiences of home and the natural world changed historically and in our own lifetimes? How have they already been impacted by unanticipated phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic? What actions would help to provide all Americans a secure sense of home, in both the built and the natural environment?
The Tiger Cat
Thornton Dial
In 2021, the Hood Museum of Art acquired ten artworks from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, including the three by Thornton Dial that form Thornton Dial: The Tiger Cat. This exhibition celebrates this acquisition, asking us to look closely at Dial’s work and consider the ways in which it broadens our understanding of American art.