Past Exhibitions

Inspired by flowers, North American artists working across time, cultural traditions, and artistic styles have embraced floral beauty in the natural world. Beyond the Bouquet highlights works from the permanent collection that showcase how artists’ explorations of joy, ritual, and knowledge through flowers can touch our own lives and shared experiences.

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Visual Kinship explores how photography defines, challenges, and reimagines the concept of family. Across diverse historical and contemporary works, the exhibition examines how images reflect and disrupt family structures shaped by colonialism, migration, transnational adoption, and queer intimacies. Photography plays a pivotal role in bridging the personal and political, offering a lens through which kinship can be recognized, claimed, and contested. The exhibition also considers how visual culture fosters alternative networks of belonging and care, expanding the notion of family beyond biological or traditional frameworks.

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Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) explores the narrative artistic practice of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero. Spanning the past decade of her work, this exhibition presents a thematic examination of Romero’s complex and layered images, which celebrate the multiplicity, beauty, and resilience of Native American and Indigenous experiences. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same title and debuting at the Hood Museum in January 2025, this is Romero’s first major solo exhibition.

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Playing upon the dual definitions of liquidity—liquid assets bought and sold, as well as liquid substances—this exhibition mines the historical connections between art, water, and commodities. Highlights from the Hood Museum’s American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts collection explore histories of global trade across water; linkages between water and tourism; liquids as artistic materials; and how nineteenth-century water pollution and historical access to clean water remain relevant to local and national discussions in our present moment.

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[Un]Mapping examines the legacies of mapmaking and invites viewers to think about alternatives for visualizing our relationships to place. This show focuses on the work of artists whose practices critique colonial legacies of cartography and employ decolonial and Indigenous ways of knowing. It considers how maps can be used not in the interests of surveillance or dispossession but as a means of placemaking.

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From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art explores the idea of food as not only nourishment but also an expression of our lived and shared experiences. This exhibition invites audiences to reflect on their relationships to foodways, which encompass our attitudes, practices, and rituals around food. Artworks across different time periods, mediums, and cultures illustrate points of connection, disconnection, and reconnection to our foodways.

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