Exhibitions Archive

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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Life in the city is lived in daily patterns of mobility. Each day, most of us stroll past the same shops and cafés, or distractedly gaze across receding rooftops from the vantage of an elevated train. We often think of time spent in transit as lost time, life on the periphery of real living. But as the French anthropologist Marc Augé has shown us, traveling through the city is a practice of history and memory. Instead of life lost, cities unfold at the stop-and-go pace of a crowded bus line. Along the way, monuments to the city’s collective history spark personal, individualized memories. In those fleeting moments, as the bus rolls along, we may be struck by the memory of a childhood trip to Central Park or suddenly recall a moment of heartbreaking loss. On the commute, the past and the present intermingle in barely recognized flashes of illumination, all in the time it takes to glance up from the morning newspaper. 

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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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Abstraction comes from many different sources. It may begin with a concrete object, or something less tangible, such as an emotion or thought. Artists use abstraction to express that which cannot be conveyed through representation and to explore other sources of art-making. The works in the exhibition date from immediately after World War II until the present. Some were strongly influenced by abstract expressionism, and others stem from later movements, such as minimalism and conceptualism. This exhibition highlights three important sources of abstraction: gesture, emotion, and shape.

This exhibition was curated by Philip Dytko, Class of 2017, Pauline Lewis, Class of 2016, and Molly Siegel, Class of 2016, each of whom was enrolled in Professor Mary Coffey’s ARTH 71: The American Century. This course provides a thematic overview of American art in the twentieth century. Students in the class were placed into curatorial teams of three, and each team identified a theme, selected six objects from the permanent collection, drafted labels, and proposed an installation design for the exhibition. The teams presented their proposals to the entire class at the end of the term, and students voted on their favorite. Gesture, Emotion, Shape: Sources of Abstraction was the winning exhibition. 

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Still We Rise features contemporary art from six women of color whose work embodies the theme of existence/resistance. Working against the backdrop of sexism and racism in the United States today, in its particular “post-racial” moment, these artists remind us that women of color live in the dangerous intersection of race-and gender-based forms of oppression.

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