Exhibitions Archive
The Climate and Demographics Informing the California Watercolor
Watercolor Washes and the Lure of the Sun
From the 1930s to the 1960s, a group of watercolorists based in Southern California responded to the region's distinctive environment by creating primarily large, colorful watercolors of the local scene, painted on the spot outdoors. These generally upbeat, optimistic images celebrated the Edenic California landscape, despite the dramatic demographic and economic forces that were already altering both the physical characteristics and social mosaic there.
Seeing Time in Photography
Escaping the Moment
The weakness of human sight—its flickering hesitation and intermittent inattentiveness—gives way to the verity of the apparatus's machinic capture. Photo-graphia: one writes the light of reality, burning it into film. With these qualities, photography is still often said to be about holding on to lost moments.
Fifty Works for Fifty States: New Hampshire
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel CollectionIn 2008, the Hood Museum of Art was selected as the New Hampshire museum recipient of fifty works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection. Dorothy and Herbert Vogel are somewhat unusual art collectors. Now retired, Herb worked for the U.S. Post Office and Dorothy was a librarian. After their marriage in 1962, they developed a deep interest in the New York contemporary art scene. They began collecting and, using only their civil servants' salaries, acquired over four thousand objects. The Vogels befriended many young artists, many at the beginnings of their careers, and often purchased works on paper in order to store them more easily in their modest apartment. Their collection is strong in minimal and conceptual art, especially drawings, but moves beyond those categories. Much of the Vogels' collection was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but in 2007 they decided to distribute 2,500 works nationally. Dubbed the "50X50 project," they donated fifty works to one institution in each state. The Hood Museum of Art was honored to be the New Hampshire institution designated to receive this important gift.
Environmental Photography from the Hood Museum of Art
Looking Back at Earth
This exhibition showcases photography that goes beyond landscape to engage with issues of the earth and its environment. It features the work of Subhankar Banerjee, Virginia Beahan, Daniel Beltrá, Diane Burko, J. Henry Fair, Emmet Gowin, Patricia MacDonald, David Maisel, and Ian Teh, among others. Its themes include consumption and waste, industrial pollution, urban sprawl, unsustainable farming, and climate change and its effects on the Arctic.
The Box in a Valise
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp described his Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise) as a “portable museum” that would allow him to carry around his life’s work in a traveling box. The artist spent five years, between 1935 and 1940, recreating his oeuvre in miniature through photographs, hand-colored reproductions, and diminutive models. These facsimiles of the artist’s major paintings, drawings, and sculpture were then placed in imitation-leather boxes or valises that he would spend the rest of his life assembling. Duchamp’s most significant works are cleverly arranged inside each box like a traveling salesman’s wares; open the lid and you find a treasure trove of art objects all reproduced on a miniature scale. The Hood Museum of Art recently acquired an important example of the Box in a Valise edition. This work, which the artist housed in a red linen-lined box about the size of a large attaché case, will be shown at Dartmouth College for the first time in this installation.
The Expanding Grid
This exhibition explores the important legacy of cubism and other forms of grid-based abstraction for contemporary artistic expression. The structural underpinnings of the pioneering works of art that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque made in the 1910s allowed them to negate the perspectival illusionism of naturalistic representation. Subsequent artists, such as Josef Albers and Mark Rothko, refined and developed the grid-like scaffolding of cubism to produce an austere and rather impersonal form of abstract art, in which flatness and order were of paramount importance. By the 1960s, however, a new generation of artists, including Chuck Close and Eva Hesse, began to negatively associate the rigid geometry of modernist abstraction with male dominance and political authoritarianism. These artists expanded and, in some cases, exploded the modernist grid to create works of art that embraced political content, figuration, narrative, and subjectivity. As this exhibition shows, contemporary artists continue to explore the temporal and spatial possibilities of grid-based art in works of art that challenge and revitalize the invented language of abstraction.