Past Exhibitions
The Philip H. Greene Gift of California Watercolors, 1930-1960
Coastline to Skyline
This exhibition celebrates the recent gift from Hanover resident Philip H. Greene of thirteen works by the California-style watercolorists. The mostly southern California artists who made up this informal but close-knit group were most active from the late 1920s through the 1950s. They achieved national recognition for their generally large-scale watercolors painted with broad, saturated washes in a manner that was bold and expressive, yet representational. Among the best known of the group were Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Rex Brandt, Barse Miller, Emil Kosa Jr., and, from northern California, Dong Kingman. Just as their regionalist contemporaries Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton portrayed traditions associated with everyday life in the rural midwest, these artists celebrated their West Coast environs through images of the state's dramatic coastline, agricultural and fishing traditions, public amusements, and bustling cities. While many of the artists seem to pay homage in their work to a way of life that was disappearing in the face of urban development, others convey in their watercolors an appreciation for the modern Southland cityscape. In keeping with the populist, nationalistic mood of the era, these artists captured unpretentious, recognizably American subjects that transcended their regional content and appealed to audiences from coast to coast.
The Design Process and Details of the Hood Museum of Art
Taking a Look AroundIcons of the 1960's
Ruscha and Pop
Highlights from the Hood's pop art collection reveal the intersection between life and art through the appropriation of media, commercial, and popular culture imagery. Focused around Ed Ruscha's Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963), Ruscha and Pop explores aspects of pop art including the transformation of the everyday object into art, the popular interest in consumerism and commercial architecture, and the collapsing of boundaries between high and low art and culture. The charged cultural environment of the 1960's fills the work of first-generation pop icons including Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as artists immediately following them, including Mel Ramos and Stephen Shore.
Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant
Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie
Contemporary Seminole artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie's photographs respond to the perpetuating stereotypes of Native American peoples caused by ubiquitous early Western photography of Native people fixed in a historical past. Looking inward to document moments and thoughts about childhood and family, high school, friends, particular experiences, and dreams, she delivers a deeply moving installation that comprises a strong political statement about Native sovereignty and cultural oppression intermixed with poignant storytelling and personal convictions.
The Art of the Stripe
Sean Scully
Sean Scully has moved steadily over the past three decades to his current position in the highest rank of painters working in the abstract tradition. The recent American touring exhibition Wall of Light, which concluded to very positive reviews at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is currently being succeeded by a major touring show in Europe. Scully began painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the dominance of Op Art in Britain. He then moved to America, where, after five years of struggle, he found his painterly voice in the stripe. Scully has relentlessly pursued the possibilities offered by his exploration of colored stripes, always remaining true to his assertion that "the stripe is a signifier of modernism." The Hood's exhibition explores Scully's work since the early 1970s and culminates with the first showing in America of the artist’s beautiful series Holly, made in memory and in honor of his mother. Along with over twenty large oil paintings, a small selection of photographs demonstrates Scully's fascination with the architectural structures of our built environment, the inspiration of so much in his abstract paintings.
New Works by Magdalene Odundo
Resonance and InspirationThis exhibition presents recent vessels and drawings by Magdalene Odundo. Reflecting the technical and conceptual influences of an artist who lives abroad and has studied in England, India, and Nigeria, Odundo’s work is inspired by millennia of vessel-making from all over the world. Her lustrous thin-walled vessels are so difficult to make that she completes only a few each year. An illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Magdalene Odundo is an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist whose handbuilt vesselshave become the fulcrum of a world of pottery traditions. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950, Odundo is presently professor of ceramics at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design University College in Farnham.
Odundo's thin-walled vessels embody a farflung ceramic history that ranges from her native Kenya to Greco-Roman antiquity. Blending an exceptionally large list of "ancient and contemporary 'heroes,'" Odundo's symmetrical and biomorphic pots reflect her own unique relationship with clay, fire, and form. As she explains, "Clay is a simple substance with a complex structure playing havoc without and within our kilns, keeping us guessing and daring to change its natural composition. Yet, like an alchemist seeking to make gold, I continue to seek to create that ultimate elusive simple vessel which will hold magic for me."