Exhibitions Archive
Drawing Lines
What do you think about when you hear the phrase draw lines? A line can separate but also connect; it can create divisions and boundaries but also generate space. For artists, the line has been a critical apparatus for exploration. Through weaving, painting, sketching, cutting, collaging, or layering—whether their lines stretch in two dimensions or extend into our space—the artists in Drawing Lines activate the line as a generative form with expansive potential.
Recent Work by Louise Hamlin
In the MomentThis exhibition celebrates the work of Louise Hamlin, the former George Frederick Jewett professor of studio art and area head of printmaking at Dartmouth. Inspiration can be found in many places. For Louise, inspiration is not found in the grandiose, but rather in the subtle, familiar, and overlooked corners of our everyday world. In each scene, whether a fog-filled landscape or bundle of garlic scapes from the farmstand, Hamlin has explored light and form, creating images that suggest paint (or ink) and color as her driving force.
Coloring the Western Canon
Color holds many negative associations as something that has been constructed in opposition to whiteness. Whereas whiteness tends to symbolize purity, beauty, and refinement, color often represents the dirty, exotic, and primitive. Coloring the Western Canon examines how our relationship to color has largely been shaped by Eurocentric concepts of art. By navigating the various ways nonwhite artists use color to explore their cultural identities, this exhibition challenges the boundaries of our whitewashed Western canon and asks you to reconsider how you think about color.
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.
Contemporary Native Ceramics
Form & RelationThis exhibition showcases the versatility of ceramics and the many forms it takes through the hands of six Indigenous artists from various regions within what is now the United States. Through their innovative and critical work, Anita Fields, Courtney M. Leonard, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ruben Olguin, Rose B. Simpson, and Roxanne Swentzell wrestle with concepts such as community, identity, gender, land, extraction, language, and responsibility.
This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World explores artistic responses to the natural world by diverse American artists working from the early nineteenth century to the present. It is the first major installation of the museum’s historic American collection to be organized thematically, rather than chronologically. More significantly, it features not only Euro-American, African American, Latin American, and Asian American works but also, for the first time, traditional and contemporary Native American works hung alongside this early to contemporary "American" art. This collaboratively curated exhibition of approximately 160 works fills four galleries as it compels us to consider new perspectives on historical and contemporary art by diverse artists, Native and non-Native, and to reflect on our own relationship to place and land. How, for instance, have experiences of home and the natural world changed historically and in our own lifetimes? How have they already been impacted by unanticipated phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic? What actions would help to provide all Americans a secure sense of home, in both the built and the natural environment?
The Tiger Cat
Thornton Dial
In 2021, the Hood Museum of Art acquired ten artworks from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, including the three by Thornton Dial that form Thornton Dial: The Tiger Cat. This exhibition celebrates this acquisition, asking us to look closely at Dial’s work and consider the ways in which it broadens our understanding of American art.