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.
The Aftermath of the War Between the States in Consumer-Driven Art
"Bringing the Thing Home"A History of Viewing from the Renaissance to the Present Day
The Art of Spectatorship
This companion to the course Introduction to Art History II focused on five topics- devotional images, artistic presence in a work of art, voyeurism and the female nude, portrayals of social class and conflict, and artistic quotation and appropriation-surrounding the changing experience of viewing art from the Renaissance to the present day. Images such as Saint Veronica's Sudarium (about sixteenth century), which presents the miraculous transference of Christ's image to Veronica's handkerchief upon route to the crucifixion, appeared alongside Dana Salvo's Mendoza Household Shrine (about 1995), a photograph of a homemade altar with plastic fruits and artificial lights. Other groupings included images of nude classical goddesses and Reginald Marsh's mid-twentieth-century tempera paintings of a New Jersey striptease. Depictions of class convergence in city streets by artists ranging from Honore Daumier to John Sloan further explored the exhibition's themes.
The Art of the Stripe
Sean Scully
Sean Scully has moved steadily over the past three decades to his current position in the highest rank of painters working in the abstract tradition. The recent American touring exhibition Wall of Light, which concluded to very positive reviews at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is currently being succeeded by a major touring show in Europe. Scully began painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the dominance of Op Art in Britain. He then moved to America, where, after five years of struggle, he found his painterly voice in the stripe. Scully has relentlessly pursued the possibilities offered by his exploration of colored stripes, always remaining true to his assertion that "the stripe is a signifier of modernism." The Hood's exhibition explores Scully's work since the early 1970s and culminates with the first showing in America of the artist’s beautiful series Holly, made in memory and in honor of his mother. Along with over twenty large oil paintings, a small selection of photographs demonstrates Scully's fascination with the architectural structures of our built environment, the inspiration of so much in his abstract paintings.
New Works by Magdalene Odundo
Resonance and InspirationThis exhibition presents recent vessels and drawings by Magdalene Odundo. Reflecting the technical and conceptual influences of an artist who lives abroad and has studied in England, India, and Nigeria, Odundo’s work is inspired by millennia of vessel-making from all over the world. Her lustrous thin-walled vessels are so difficult to make that she completes only a few each year. An illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Magdalene Odundo is an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist whose handbuilt vesselshave become the fulcrum of a world of pottery traditions. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950, Odundo is presently professor of ceramics at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design University College in Farnham.
Odundo's thin-walled vessels embody a farflung ceramic history that ranges from her native Kenya to Greco-Roman antiquity. Blending an exceptionally large list of "ancient and contemporary 'heroes,'" Odundo's symmetrical and biomorphic pots reflect her own unique relationship with clay, fire, and form. As she explains, "Clay is a simple substance with a complex structure playing havoc without and within our kilns, keeping us guessing and daring to change its natural composition. Yet, like an alchemist seeking to make gold, I continue to seek to create that ultimate elusive simple vessel which will hold magic for me."