Exhibitions Archive
Margaret Bourke-White, World War II, and Life Magazine
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971) was one of the first photographers that Life magazine sent to Europe to cover World War II. The images she sent back filled endless pages of the magazine; Americans were riveted; and sales skyrocketed. This exhibition is drawn entirely from a unique portfolio of her photographs created near the end of the war.
Margaret Bourke-White in the USSR, 1930-32
"The Land of Tantalizing Mystery"
Fortune magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White often managed to garner attention for herself as much as for her work. Her Russia portfolio, excerpted here, was no exception, primarily because she was the first outside photojournalist allowed into the Soviet Union during the first Five Year Plan (1928–1932). Over three consecutive trips, she produced images of factories and other infrastructure projects that had been kept secret. To get these pictures, she convinced a series of Soviet bureaucrats that she could help the country gain international recognition for their achievements through her photographs.
Prior to her first trip she had heard about the great privations the people were enduring and she travelled with a trunk of canned food. Everywhere she went, the construction was awe-inspiring, but the plight of the workers was hard to ignore. In 1930, she described the situation cryptically, “Little food; No shoes; Terrible inefficiency; Steady progress; Great hope.” On her subsequent visits, she moved beyond the machine-age subjects that had defined her career and began to focus on Russian people’s lives. The twelve photogravures featured here are part of the special portfolio she published in 1934 with Argus press.
Windows in Art
On ViewOn View, a thematic exploration of windows in art, is organized around three central themes: a view into the private world, a view into the public world, and the abstraction of the window itself. Featuring works by twentieth and twenty-first century American artists, the exhibition invites you not only to consider what lies beyond the window, but also how its framing influences our perception.
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.
Pigment of Imagination
Ochre is a family of mineral pigments made from iron oxides and hydroxides, commonly known as rust. Humans have collected ochre for at least 500,000 years, and it underpins the earliest evidence of symbolic culture, and later, figurative art, in the archaeological record. Pigment of Imagination explores the dual identity of ochre––it is both mineral and pigment––and the ways individuals and communities have used it to express complex relationships with the environment. To paint with ochre is to paint with the earth itself; it is a means of embodiment, of putting the land beneath one’s feet and into the storyscapes of cultural knowledge. The works exhibited here––from Africa, Australia, Oceania, and North and South America––reflect the global distribution of ochre and its universal appeal as both material and metaphor. To view these works is to visit the landscape of their creation, to bear witness to place as much as meaning.
Ga Bose Gangwe
Mohau Modisakeng
After dark, people passing the Hood Museum are able to experience a video work, Ga Bose Gangwe, by the South African artist Mohau Modisakeng. This graceful expression of resilience and determination is on display in the vitrine window above the north entrance to the museum until July 1, 2023. The title of the video comes from a Setswana (a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa) proverb, phiri o rile ga bo se gangwe, that translates to “better luck next time” or “do again" or "try again.” Using the movements of a group of Black male dancers as metaphor, Modisakeng reflects on how the specter of colonialism weighs down the aspirations of post-apartheid South Africa and other post-colonial countries.
Social Surrealism and the Exploration of Identity
The works of Mika Rottenberg and Luis Gispert use a heightened sense of reality to explore ideas of class, gender, and identity. Surrealist at times, their photography and video installations are both filled with exuberant iconography and highly choreographed––every element is carefully orchestrated, from the extravagant outfits to the upscale mise-en-scène and the subjects’ aggressive and theatrical gestures. Their works draw from Social Surrealism, a movement which borrows from European surrealist techniques of the 1920s and 30s to provide social commentary and criticism. The surrealist art movement of the early twentieth century challenged the status-quo and explored new understandings of the unconscious. The rise of revolutionary thinking and liberation of the mind and artistic expression also turned to social and political activism. Rottenberg and Gispert explore similar ideas through the lens of the Latinx experience of contemporary capitalism.
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.