Past Exhibitions
Gifts in Honor of the Hood Museum of Art
Celebrating Twenty Years
The Hood Museum of Art's collections at Dartmouth College, like many other museum collections, are varied and idiosyncratic, and many of its greatest riches stem from the imagination and collecting impulses of individual curators and donors. Celebrating Twenty Years showcases exceptional works of art that have been generously offered by Dartmouth alumni and friends as recent outright and promised gifts to the museum in honor of twenty years of the Hood Museum of Art in the postmodern building designed by Charles Moore and Centerbrook Architects. These important gifts will greatly enhance the museum collections and highlight the tremendous generosity of Dartmouth friends and alumni. In addition, they will expand the museum's ability to provide Dartmouth students and faculty and all visitors to the museum with direct and meaningful encounters with original works of art.
Paintings and Drawings from the Collection
Form and Presence
Enrico Riley, Senior Lecturer, selected paintings and drawings from the Hood’s collection for his fall drawing course. Students enrolled in the course helped him hang the works and studied them throughout the term. Artists in the show included Amadeo Modigliani, Alice Neel, Milton Resnick, and Jake Berthot.
A Digital Wonder Room by MANUAL
Archive Fever
Husband-and-wife digital artist team Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, known collectively as MANUAL, presented their latest work, a site-specific installation commissioned by the Hood on the occasion of the museum’s twentieth anniversary. Reconsidering the intersections between art history, culture, and technology, this work explores the museum’s vast collection in playful and unexpected ways. Archive Fever unfolds at a changing pace that is completely determined by the computer program itself, so it is unlikely that repeat visitors to the museum would ever see the same form twice.
Relooking at Photographs, Deciphering the Details
The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly
Drawn from Nature
The complete plant lithograph series of Ellsworth Kelly will be on view in this exhibition, documenting the artist's forty years of creating a rich variety of line drawings of plants, fruits, and flowers with exceptional simplicity and beauty. An American artist of world renown, Ellsworth Kelly, born in 1923, is distinguished for his pure minimalist style. The sixty lithographs featured in this exhibition provide a critical link to the artist's vision of nature and his practice of abstraction.
Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings
Marks of Distinction
Highlighting a stunning diversity of works dating from 1769 to 1969, many of which have never before been on view, Marks of Distinction features the talents of such distinguished artists as John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Stella, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Romare Bearden. The exhibition reveals the rich variety of approaches, media, and subjects that have attracted American artists over the course of two centuries, ranging from Copley's magnificent 1769 pastel portrait of New Hampshire's last royal governor, John Wentworth, to early-nineteenth-century folk portraits and landscapes, lyrical nineteenth-century watercolor marines and interiors, dynamic images of New York City in the jazz age, and purely abstract compositions by pioneering artists associated with abstract expressionism and minimalism.