Exhibitions Archive
The Concinnitas Portfolio
Concinnitas is a Latin term that connotes an elegant, skillful joining of elements. It was used by Renaissance scholar, artist, and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) to describe the beauty found in the confluence of perfect uses of number, position, and outline. The Concinnitas project was a two-year collaborative venture between Parasol Press and Daniel Rockmore, professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth. In 2012, Parasol commissioned ten mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists—including two Nobel Laureates and five Fields Medalists—to create etchings of the mathematical expression most meaningful to them. These formulae were then printed by the fine-art print shop Harlan and Weaver as aquatints, evoking the look of equations quickly and elegantly sketched in white chalk on a blackboard.
The Stahl Collection
The Hood Museum of Art's striking installation of thirty prints, drawings, and ceramics from the recently donated Stahl collection presents a wonderful opportunity to learn from art objects chosen by passionate, discerning collectors. Assembled over a period of sixty years, these highlights include bold, socially critical German Expressionist prints by Max Beckmann, Ludwig Meidner, and Emil Nolde, complemented by early twentieth-century American works on paper in a social realist mode. A cornerstone of the Stahl collection, assembled over decades, is Georges Rouault’s poignant series of eight aquatints titled The Circus (Le Cirque), 1930. The installation also features late twentieth-century works by New Hampshire artists, including James Aponovich and pioneering ceramicists Gerry Williams and Edwin and Mary Scheier. These highlights are drawn from the 118 works donated by Susan E. Hardy, Nancy R. Wilsker, Sarah A. Stahl, and John S. Stahl, the children of the original collectors, the late Barbara J. and David G. Stahl, Dartmouth Class of 1947. The high quality of the works, combined with their strong thematic links to a wide range of academic fields, makes these new acquisitions prime candidates for the interdisciplinary, object-based teaching that is central to the Hood Museum of Art’s mission.
Twentieth-Century Inuit Art from the Collection of the Hood Museum of Art
Tradition and TransformationThe majority of artists in this installation represent a generation of Inuit from the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada who lived fully “on the land.” Several changes occurred during the mid-twentieth century that pressured the Inuit to change their traditional life ways by moving into settlements. Although the Inuit had been trading works they made out of a variety of materials since the time of contact, new visitors encouraged them to use their knowledge and skills to create work—in stone, fabric, drawings, and on paper—that would be oriented for a non-Inuit art market.
The majority of works in this installation were made by the first generation of Inuit artists to exhibit and sell their work to new markets in the south through art dealers and cooperatives. The objects they produced are remarkable works of art, widely sought after by collectors, and now in the collections of major museums all over the world. Most importantly, the production of this work created a vehicle for preserving cultural knowledge and sustaining tradition while innovating and creating new forms of expression.
Trevor Fairbrother, John T. Kirk, and the Hood Museum of Art
Collecting and Sharing
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.
An Exhibition in Honor of Adolph Weil Jr.
Canaletto's Vedute Prints
Although the Italian eighteenth-century artist Antonio Canaletto is best known for his luminous, sweeping views of the Grand Canal and Piazza San Marco, the Vedute, a portfolio of prints made in the early 1740s, reveal another side of Venice. These scenes are intimate in scale and contain an extraordinary variety of subject matter, encompassing both real and imaginary views, from urban portraits to bucolic landscapes. This exhibition presents the full range of Canaletto’s Vedute project and celebrates the legacy of Adolph J. “Bucks” Weil, Class of 1935, an astute and generous collector who over his lifetime amassed one of the most impressive collections of Old Master prints in the country.
(Re)Imagining Home
Home is a complex idea imbued with a variety of meanings and associations. This exhibition explores home as a mutable emotional and conceptual phenomenon inextricably linked to physical spaces. Home is constantly (re)imagined, subject to continual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction both materially and in the mind. Homes are highly personalized spaces that represent personal narratives and inner lives and continually evolve as their inhabitants age or move. Whether actual or staged, physical or imagined, idyllic or in ruins, images of homes raise the questions: Where is home? What is home? Does (or can) home travel with you or is it something forever left behind?