Past Exhibitions
Sources of Abstraction
Gesture, Emotion, ShapeAbstraction comes from many different sources. It may begin with a concrete object, or something less tangible, such as an emotion or thought. Artists use abstraction to express that which cannot be conveyed through representation and to explore other sources of art-making. The works in the exhibition date from immediately after World War II until the present. Some were strongly influenced by abstract expressionism, and others stem from later movements, such as minimalism and conceptualism. This exhibition highlights three important sources of abstraction: gesture, emotion, and shape.
This exhibition was curated by Philip Dytko, Class of 2017, Pauline Lewis, Class of 2016, and Molly Siegel, Class of 2016, each of whom was enrolled in Professor Mary Coffey’s ARTH 71: The American Century. This course provides a thematic overview of American art in the twentieth century. Students in the class were placed into curatorial teams of three, and each team identified a theme, selected six objects from the permanent collection, drafted labels, and proposed an installation design for the exhibition. The teams presented their proposals to the entire class at the end of the term, and students voted on their favorite. Gesture, Emotion, Shape: Sources of Abstraction was the winning exhibition.
Women of Color Existence/Resistance in Contemporary Art
Still We Rise
Still We Rise features contemporary art from six women of color whose work embodies the theme of existence/resistance. Working against the backdrop of sexism and racism in the United States today, in its particular “post-racial” moment, these artists remind us that women of color live in the dangerous intersection of race-and gender-based forms of oppression.
Class of 1965 Photographers
Picturing the World
The Class of 1965 produced Dick Durrance, Dewitt Jones, Christopher Knight, Heinz Kluetmeier, and Joel Sternfeld, a remarkable group of photographers. With subjects from the Olympics to the Vietnam War, the photographs in this exhibition depict a variety of subjects from around the world, capturing the unique viewpoint of each photographer. This exhibition honors the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1965.
A Centennial Exhibition
Allan Houser
Allan Houser (1914–1994) was a noted American sculptor, painter, and draftsman and one of the major figures in Native American art of the twentieth century. He often drew on his Chiricahua Apache heritage when making sculptures that depict the Native American people of the Southwest. A versatile artist, he also created modernist abstract sculptures and worked in a variety of media including bronze, stone, and steel. Dartmouth College and the Hood Museum of Art celebrate the centennial of his birth with an installation of five major sculptural works in the Maffei Arts Plaza and Hood gateway, as well as a fall 2014 exhibition of drawings in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center.
Emblem, type, symbol, token, trope, image, sign—all of these words describe specific visual forms that represent abstract ideas through recognized shapes, colors, and figures. Many emblems contain culturally specific messages, often taken from sacred or ancient texts, the meanings of which evolve over time. Since these images are quickly legible to members of a shared culture, artists mobilize emblems to provoke certain reactions in an audience. This exhibition draws together various types of emblematic prints—primarily woodcuts—that address social problems and issues.
The Object World
The world is comprised of objects. These discrete items acquire meaning through relationships and context, yet are defined by their own autonomy. To give order to the things that surround us, we create categories, which, in turn, rely upon cultural connotations that impart meaning, value, and significance. The common language of things can convey a multiplicity of ideas such as concerns, class, or interests. The audience interprets the subjects by and through the objects that surround them.
Works of art present a special category as they occupy several object worlds simultaneously. Artworks epitomize Graham Harman’s definition of a “real object” as one that has not an outer effect, but an inner one. The tactility of the object is, of course, present, but the value lies not purely in its physical qualities, but in what it evokes.
This exhibition was curated by Katie Hornstein, assistant professor of Art History, and Jane Carroll, senior lecturer of Art History, in conjunction with their class Introduction to Art History II. Students used these works of art for a writing assignment. This exhibition has been made possible by the Harrington Gallery Fund.