Exhibitions Archive
Word and Image
Organized in collaboration with twenty-two Studio Art Majors from the Class of 2013, this exhibition celebrates the dynamic dialogue and complex interactions between art and language in contemporary art. Adopting a historical perspective to understand current innovations, Word and Image presents key examples of paintings, sculpture, video, photography and other works on paper by a wide range of artists, including Gerald Auten, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Heyman, Faith Ringgold, Ed Ruscha, Nancy Spero, and Fred Wilson. The word-imbued artworks on display reveal the strange, unsettling, and often humorous and subversive results when words escape from their traditional confines and begin to infiltrate the visual arts.
The Judith and Joseph Barker Collection of Japanese Prints
The Women of Shin Hanga
In an attempt to revive traditional Japanese woodblock prints, artists of the shin hanga (new print) movement were forced to reconcile approaches to female subjects developed over the previous two centuries with the impact of modernity on both women and the arts in early-twentieth-century Japan. To ensure the contemporary relevancy of their work, the subjects they depicted ranged between deeply conservative and highly provocative conceptions of femininity, with demure, self-effacing geisha representing the former and so-called modern girls, known for their Westernized appearance and morally suspect lifestyles, representing the latter. By retaining production methods honed by their predecessors, they cultivated audiences in Japan and America who appreciated the unique legacies of the Japanese woodblock print tradition. These strategies successfully ensured a place for shin hanga depictions of women in an environment where new print media and styles imported from the West competed with Japan's most treasured visual traditions. The results of their efforts are amply apparent in this exhibition. With ninety woodblock prints from the Judith and Joseph Barker Collection, The Women of Shin Hanga showcases two and a half centuries of Japanese print designers' engagement with female subjects.
Recent Acquisitions
Japanese Prints in the Hood Museum of ArtThe fifteen prints in this gallery represent the Hood Museum of Art’s ongoing efforts to develop its collection of Japanese woodblock prints as a teaching resource. With publication dates ranging from the 1750s through the 1930s, these prints document several aspects of Japan’s woodblock print culture. This selection features prints in a wide variety of formats representing major print genres including kabuki actor prints (yakusha-e), pictures of fashionable women (bijinga), perspective prints (uki-e), landscape prints (fūkeiga), warrior prints (musha-e), pictures of foreigners residing in Yokohama (Yokohama-e), prints depicting Japan’s late-nineteenth-century modernization (kaika-e), and early-twentieth-century prints (shin hanga).
Interpreting Portrayals of "Real" Women in Ancient Greece
Beyond Aphrodite
Many aspects of the lives of ancient Greek women remain a mystery to us today. While surviving literary sources and artifacts often feature powerful female goddesses, images and texts describing the lives of everyday, or "real," Greek women are more difficult to identify and understand. This exhibition presents three objects that depict those women.
Modern Melancholy
The artists selected for this exhibition express the melancholic condition within a contemporary context and raise questions about what distinguishes melancholy today. In a society of constant sensory stimulation, instant gratification, and hedonistic saturation, have happiness and satisfaction become an obligation? Have we attained the object of our desire but lost the reason for its desirability? Through their deliberate interpretations of melancholic subjects and settings, the artists in this exhibition realize the vitality that emerges as the melancholic sees opportunities everywhere to mourn this lost desire. In fact, melancholy's redemption lies precisely within those infinitely unfolding creative and intellectual possibilities that it reveals.
This exhibition highlights the extraordinary Owen and Wagner Collection at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, through its display of more than one hundred works of contemporary Indigenous art from Australia. These objects are by artists from outback communities as well as major metropolitan centers and span five decades of creative activity. They also represent the many art-making practices of Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent, including acrylic paintings on linen and canvas, earthen ochre paintings on bark, board, and canvas, and sculpture in a variety of media. While the exhibition features many influential artists who have contributed to the development of an Indigenous art canon since the 1970s, the focus is squarely on subsequent generations of artists, who are breathing new life into ancient stories and broadening the possibilities of Indigenous art. The exhibition therefore also includes contemporary paintings that recall the ancestral narratives of the Dreaming as well as photographs from urban-based artists who depict the contemporary realities of Indigenous people from Australia. Resonant with cultural memory, these objects reference and reinvigorate customary iconographies, speak to the history and legacy of colonization, and affirm Robert Hughes's statement that Aboriginal art is "the last great art movement of the twentieth century."