Past Exhibitions
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.
Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity
No Laughing MatterThis fall term, Dartmouth College Humanities Institute participants, including visiting residential fellows and several Dartmouth faculty members, are meeting weekly on campus to investigate the impact of visual humor on history, psychology, culture, and everyday life from multiple perspectives. No Laughing Matter is led by David Bindman (Morton Distinguished Fellow) and Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth Institute Director), under the auspices of the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College, with the participation of the Yale Center for British Art and the Du Bois Institute of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. The Humanities Institute will host an international conference, November 8-11, 2007. The Hood exhibition has also been organized in conjunction with the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting and conference, October 25-28, 2007, which will host a special panel titled Visual Humor in the Global Eighteenth Century in conjunction with the Humanities Institute.
Contemporary Art from the Arctic
Our Land
Our Land is the first major museum exhibition of contemporary art from Canada's newest territory, Nunavut. On loan from the Peabody Essex Museum and the Government of Nunavut, this exhibition features about sixty works from the important Nunavut Territorial collection of contemporary Inuit art, which celebrates the growth of Inuit creative expression over the past five decades. The exhibition is presented by the Hood in recognition of International Polar Year 2007-8 and in conjunction with the exhibition Thin Ice: Inuit Traditions within a Changing Environment.
The impetus for this exhibition, which focuses on the Hood Museum of Art’s Inuit collections and celebrates Dartmouth’s long involvement in Arctic Studies, is the International Polar Year 2007-2008. Thin Ice explores traditional Inuit life through the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art and artifacts that indigenous Arctic peoples used to survive within this challenging environment. With the understanding that the Arctic environment is undergoing rapid transformation from climate change and the significant melting of sea ice, the exhibition highlights the impact of such change on Inuit ways of life and their relationship to the region in which they live. An illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Myth of the Noble Savage
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.