Exhibitions Archive

A Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection comprises a series of exhibitions that individually and collectively celebrate the Bernstein family's gifts to the collection of the Hood Museum of Art over four decades. These shows present photography, paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by European, Japanese, and North American artists.

In spring and summer 2021, the museum features the Bernstein Collection installations Pinpricks and Pomposity: The Inventiveness of English Visual Satire, Landscape(d): Modern Photography and the Environment, and Lyrical Journey: Toko Shinoda.

In August 2021, the installations change over to Inuit Art | Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Both Sides of the Lens: Portrait Photography, and Mystic Peak: Selections from the Bernstein Collection of Japanese Art, through January 2022.

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Trade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights is part of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s well-known Trade Canoe series, which she began in 1992 as a critical response to quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s arrival to the "New World." In her Trade Canoes and other large-scale paintings, Smith often layers images, paint, text, and objects to convey entangled webs of history, colonization, and extraction that characterize the American experience. Within Forty Days and Forty Nights, Smith draws on imagery from the Christian Bible, Salish creation stories and homelands, art historical references, and pop culture. She creates a cacophonous visual narrative, signaling a possible future of mass flooding as a result of global climate change and rising sea levels. Through this painting and The Rancher, also on view in the exhibition, Smith invites audiences to engage in a complex dialogue and to reconsider the visual landscapes that shape our understandings of Native Americans.

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The works in these two galleries highlight some of the social, economic, and aesthetic developments that shaped Euro-American artistic production from the colonial period the early decades of the 20th century. These ranged from European stylistic influences and shifting taste nationally to te impact of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and to such watershed events as the Civil War. The installation demonstrates how the Hood continues to build a collection that speaks to a co mprehensive view of American art and its regional distinctions.

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Vermont-based artist Eric Aho’s series of Ice Cuts paintings is inspired by the hole cut in the ice in front of a Finnish sauna, an aspect of Finnish culture that Aho’s family has maintained to this day. Intended for an icy immersion following the heat of the sauna, the avanto, as it is called in Finnish, underscores and personalizes the inherent contrasts in nature. Aho began the Ice Cuts series nine years ago, making one painting a year of the dark void produced by the act of sawing into the thick ice. This exhibition is the first to concentrate on the Ice Cuts paintings he has created to date. The central abstract form in these compositions provides the structure for experimentation with paint texture, surface, and subtly nuanced color, lending these frozen scenes both an austere beauty and a particular vibrancy. This exhibition brings together the major paintings in the series to date and smaller, related works on paper to offer unique insight into the artistic process.

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In the spring of 2015, just days after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook Gorkha District and surrounding areas in Nepal, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 documented the immediate aftermath among these devastated communities, both in urban centers and in mountain villages only accessible by helicopter. Six weeks later, photographer Kevin Bubriski arrived in Kathmandu and captured the rebuilding of a city and the resilience of its people. A few of those images by each photographer are on view in this exhibition.

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This exhibition features the collection of Trevor Fairbrother, an independent curator, and John T. Kirk, a scholar of early American decorative arts, who have donated important works in their collection to the museum. Emphasizing the Hood’s teaching mission, this exhibition is thematically organized and each section displays one work from the museum’s collection alongside those of the donors. These themes include Histories, Wonders, Goods, Marks, Geometries, Males, and Surfaces. The exhibition will showcase paintings, drawings, and sculpture alongside early American furniture and include works by Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Marsden Hartley, Mike Kelley, Sol Lewitt, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Elizabeth Peyton, John Singer Sargent, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Wilson, and many others.

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