Exhibitions Archive
Religious Images in 16th-Century Europe
Sacrilege and IdolatryVisual Lessons in Biology
Life Forms
Life Forms explored the boundary between art and science with anatomical atlases, student drawings, wax and plaster sculptures, films and diagrams of cellular processes, and the National Institute of Health’s Visible Human Project. The exhibition coincided with Dartmouth’s spring 2006 Humanities Institute, “Visual Pedagogy and Culture in the Life Sciences.”
Myth of the Noble Savage
African Metal Body Adornment
Beauty MarksContemporary Art of East Asia
Past in Reverse
This major group exhibition from the San Diego Museum of Art features twenty established and emerging artists from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Working in a diversity of media—painting, sculpture, photography, and video, installation, and digital art—these artists engage with their traditional pasts as they map the future. Past in Reverse provides American museum visitors with a rare and extensive look at work from several vital artistic communities in Asia that are quickly gaining a foothold on the world's cultural stage. Featured artists include Soun-gui Kim, Cai Guo-Qiang, Wang Qingsong, Hiroshi Fuji, Michael Lin, and Leung Mee Ping.
The Museum as Hunter and Gatherer
CollectaneaTo collect up to a final limit is not simply to own or to control the items one finds; it is to exercise control over existence itself through possessing every sample, every specimen, every instance of an unrepeatable and nowhere duplicated series.
—Roger Cardinal and John Elsner, The Cultures of Collecting
col·lec·ta·ne·a 1.) Passages, remarks, etc., collected from various sources; (as collect. sing.) a collection of passages, a miscellany. 2.) A selection of passages from one or more authors; an anthology.
This exhibition illuminates the broader social history of the Hood by exploring the diverse "authors" of its collection history and will look at how the museum's collection has been developed and (re)defined over time. Uniting traditional with contemporary and Western with non-Western art via pottery, sculpture, utilitarian objects, textiles, photographs, and prints, col·lec·ta·ne·a explores different collecting practices and ideologies that reflect the museum's unique identity as a hunter and gatherer of material culture. Topics addressed in the exhibition include the role of private collectors in developing museum collections; the continuation of older cultural traditions in newer forms; the relation between museum collections and teaching at Dartmouth; changing perspectives of "art" versus "artifact"; the value of "hybridized" art versus "authentic" art; and the continued development of the Hood's collections in new and interesting ways.