Exhibitions Archive
The Great Mystery
Kent Monkman
Featuring a new body of paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman—including two commissioned works for the Hood Museum of Art’s permanent collections—The Great Mystery serves as both an introduction to and a revisitation of Monkman’s early interest in abstract expressionism. Drawing on the museum's existing collection of modernist abstraction, Monkman's paintings create pathways for multiple and shared understandings across cultural divides and are unlike anything we have seen from him before.
U.S. Abstraction since 1950
The Painter's Hand
For abstract painters, such as Louise Fishman and Robert Motherwell, the action of creating a brushstroke itself has a singular importance, reinforcing their individuality. Often referred to as “gestural,” these works track the movements of the artists’ hand, arms, and even bodies in the creation of imagery that favors invisible concerns such as emotion, spirituality, and the metaphysics of existence. At the same time, there have been artists who seek to downplay or eliminate all traces of their own gestures—Ellsworth Kelly and Deborah Remington—to others utilizing techniques that involve pouring, dripping, or splashing pigment onto their canvases—notably Helen Frankenthaler and Pat Steir. Taken together, these Hood Museum collection favorites suggest the continued vitality of painting and abstraction.
Connecting Threads and Woven Stories
Connecting Threads and Woven Stories gives a glimpse into the rich and diverse textile traditions of Southeast Asia. The textiles vary in style, material, and technique, including nineteenth-century Indonesian tapis, a Vietnamese photo-weaving, and a contemporary Thai textile woven with jewel beetle wings. Despite their differences, these textiles tell the stories of the peoples who made them, their cultural values, and their legacies.
A Space for Dialogue is a student-curated exhibition program that began in 2001. Hood Museum of Art interns create an installation drawn from the museum's permanent collection by engaging with every aspect of curation, from doing research and selecting objects, to choosing frames and a wall color, to planning a layout and writing labels and a brochure, to giving a public talk. There have been over 100 A Space for Dialogue exhibitions on a wide variety of themes.
Images of Violence, 1500–1900
Recording War
While many images of battle celebrate glorious victories or acts of bravery, other representations record instances of trauma and suffering. This exhibition brings together depictions of conflict that focus attention on the human effects of war, especially on civilians. Featuring selections from Francisco de Goya’s famous series, Disasters of War, in the context of prints and drawings made by European artists between 1500 and 1900, this exhibition examines how such images present critical historical evidence of the human experiences of violence.
Historical Imaginary
Historical Imaginary pairs an unfinished study for Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware with historical and contemporary artworks from the Hood Museum’s collection to explore how artists—literally—constructed ideas about US history. This exhibition questions how artworks shaped, and continue to shape, our perception of the past, in the hopes that we can build upon our shared, complex, and sometimes violent history to imagine and create a more equitable future.
Legacies of Queer Indigenous Liberation
Love as CeremonyLove as Ceremony: Legacies of Two-Spirit Liberation highlights the work of contemporary North American “Two-Spirit” artists, exploring the ways in which two-spirit communities reclaim ancestral knowledge and imagine possible futures. The exhibition focuses on expressions of joy, love, and liberation in an effort to both resist and dispel Western colonial characterizations of queerness which have historically perpetuated narratives of taboo and voyeurism.
A Space for Dialogue is a student-curated exhibition program that began in 2001. Hood Museum of Art interns create an installation drawn from the museum's permanent collection by engaging with every aspect of curation, from doing research and selecting objects, to choosing frames and a wall color, to planning a layout and writing labels and a brochure, to giving a public talk. There have been over 100 A Space for Dialogue exhibitions on a wide variety of themes.