Past Exhibitions
Contemporary Indigenous Australian Photography
Shifting the LensDrawing from the Hood Museum’s collection of Indigenous Australian art, Shifting the Lens features photography by Christian Thompson, Fiona Foley, Bindi Cole, Michael Cook, Darren Siwes, Tony Albert, and Michael Riley that interrogates and conveys the multidimensionality of Indigenous Australian experiences.
What Do You See?
Vision 2020Mass media and technology inform not only our understanding of the contemporary world but also our self-perception. Vision 2020: What Do You See? highlights works from the Hood Museum’s collection that grapple with the impact of visual media and technology on body image in the 20th and 21st centuries. The artists in this exhibition encourage conversation about beauty ideals, gender, self-perception, and agency in mass media.
Portrait of the Artist as an Indian / Portrait of the Indian as an Artist
In this gallery of "portraits," contemporary Native artists offer us some very different ideas about who they are and whom their work portrays. Speaking directly to and about stereotypes embedded in the American imagination, as Natives are presented in paintings, photographs, popular art, and public performance, new Native artists reshape their identities as both Indians and artists who portray the unexpected.
Nineteenth-Century European Sculpture
Emulating Antiquity
Powerful ancient goddesses and heroic warriors populate this gallery of French, British, and American sculpture from the 19th century. Accompanied by Lawrence Alma Tadema's monumental painting The Sculpture Gallery from the mid-1870s—a treatise on the legacy of ancient Greek and Roman art—the works testify to the prominent place of figural sculpture at this time. The lenses through which we view this art have shifted in the last thirty years, prompting the exploration of themes from homoeroticism and sexuality to changing aesthetic ideals.
Cubism and Its Aftershocks
For the United States, modernism in the first half of the 20th century emerged from a transatlantic dialogue among artists, writers, philosophers, and myrid other forward-looking thinkers. This gallery focuses on the exchange of ideas between art centers such as Paris and New York while celebrating the contributions of individual artists.
Black Bodies on the Cross
Black Bodies on the Cross attempts to capture the dissonance and duality present in the Black Christian experience, as seen through the eyes of postwar and contemporary African American artists including Romare Bearden, Ashley Bryan, Kara Walker, and Enrico Riley. By inserting Black subjects into Biblical narratives, these artists explore the ways in which the Black experience can be understood as part of a universalizing Christian narrative that, ironically, often excludes Black subjects.