Exhibitions Archive
Migrant Bodies and Latinx Identities
Los MojadosLos Mojados: Migrant Bodies and Latinx Identities highlights prints and photographs from the Hood’s collection that speak to the complexity of the US-Latinx experience. Ranging from migrant labor rights issues in the 1960s to the current Central American refugee crisis, these works explore an array of cross-cultural issues though an exploration of the body and accessible media. This exhibition seeks to insert Latinx art and culture into the greater historical narrative of the United States while encouraging viewers to rethink the boundaries of American art.
Narratives in Japanese Woodblock Prints
Japanese woodblock-print artists produced numerous rich engagements with culturally resonant narratives that were often loosely based on historical events, then subsequently embellished in textual sources and their theatrical adaptations. The artists featured in this exhibition explore a wide and often gendered range of responses to those narratives’ emotionally charged moral and ethical dilemmas.
The concept of consent in photography is complex. Who is giving it? Who is receiving it, if anyone at all? This exhibition, curated by the Hood Museum of Art's 2017-2018 interns, addresses these questions through four themes: Self Reflections, Individuals and Identities, Public Spheres, and Global Ethics.
Munakata at Dartmouth
Though recognized the world over for his woodblock prints, Shiko Munakata is widely regarded in Japan as one of the nation's foremost 20th-century calligraphers--an honor of considerable significance, for calligraphy has always been the highest form of art in East Asia. This Installation highlights works collecting during and since Munakata's time as a visiting artist and lecturer at Dartmouth in 1965. It also features pairings of several works from Utagawa Hiroshige's (1797-1858) Tokaido with Munakata's revisiting of these sites.
The Firmament
Toyin Ojih OdutolaLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
Stories take center stage in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings. She catches her characters at quiet moments captured from otherwise rich and complex lives. Short on specifics and long on allusion, the narratives she evokes suggest a wide emotional range. We are not meant to know exactly what takes place in these lives, but we are invited into their private spaces and we share an implied intimacy with many of them. Ojih Odutola allows us to peek, but not pry, into the lives of those who occupy her personal firmament. The artist establishes a compassionate confrontation between viewer and subject through the use of scale and through her extraordinary mark-making technique that draws us close to her surfaces. Many of the drawings are life-sized, some even full-length. This reinforces an uncanny sense that we share a space with her subjects; it also establishes an equivalence between viewer and subject.
Ojih Odutola’s signature drawing technique rewards close scrutiny. She creates small patches of color from carefully hatched lines to show skin; each plane works to delineate the exposed volumes of her sitter’s body. This technique is notably reserved for the depiction of skin; she draws clothes, furniture, and even the landscape in a looser, more broadly marked technique.
Past Forward
Sin-ying HoLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
If Chinese ceramic art has a heart, it beats in Jingdezhen. For centuries, artisans there have made vessels that traveled far and wide. Their fluid forms and recognizable decorations have inspired celebratory prose and devoted followers around the world. Today, Sin-ying Ho works in these same ceramics factories. Though Jingdezhen potters have long defined tradition, Sin-ying has expanded both their forms and their imagery in contemporary ceramics that are thoroughly of the twenty-first century. She makes her works—whether they are monumental vases or smaller, more clearly assembled sculptures—from multiple parts. She emphasizes the many parts by glazing each of the pieces differently. Together they form a whole that maintains the legacy of being created from myriad fragments.
Sin-ying’s process of building is an essential metaphor for her artistic practice. With it, she implies an optimism for our society’s continued ability to construct a unified world. As reflected in her technique, and in the themes addressed by her surface imagery, this world will necessarily be an amalgam of new and old, here and there, greed and generosity, men and women, faith and despair. Through these combinations, Sin-ying shares a worldview that acknowledges the inherent contradictions and challenges of global culture while also anticipating the uncanny beauty emerging all around us.