LEFT An installation of postwar collection highlights in the Hood’s new Northeast Gallery. Photograph© Michael Moran.
Exhibitions
Chapter three
ABOVE American art from the Hood's permanent collection in the new second-floor galleries. Photograph © Michael Moran.
Permanent Collection Reinstallations
In the leadup to the reopening of the Hood Museum of Art and in the five subsequent months covered by this annual report (through June of 2019), the museum staff installed 20 exhibitions in the facility's expanded 16,350 total square feet of galleries. These first exhibitions played with the possibilities of our newly imagined spaces and reintroduced—or, in some instances, simply introduced—works across the great depth and breadth of the permanent collection; for example, the Indigenous Australian art installation brought together highlights of the Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art with recent acquisitions, beautifully illustrating the concept of kinship to each other and to the land, while other installations of new acquisitions, including student-led efforts, explored altered and alternative global landscapes. From ancient bronzes to contemporary Native American photography and beyond, this first year of exhibition programming sampled the diverse stories contained within the museum's permanent collection. The Hood Museum recognizes the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation for the installation of its suite of six galleries presenting North American art.
The Art of Engagement
January 26 to August 11, 2019
Luise and Morton Kaish Gallery
We briefly surveyed contemporary art that is engaged with some of the signature issues addressed by artists today, including profound engagements with feminism, racism, and globalism, as well as national, ethnic, and gender identity. The artworks were rendered in diverse styles and through varying techniques, but each of the artists represented shared a desire to use art as a tool for social justice and change.
Global Cultures: Ancient and Premodern
January 26 to December 1, 2019
Gene Y. Kim Gallery
While the museum's ancient and premodern collections are neither chronologically nor geographically comprehensive, they are broad and rich. In keeping with the idea that individual objects are representative of a specific time and place, the objects on view (with one exception) occupy separate vitrines and pedestals. As a whole, they symbolically reflect the value of learning about diverse societies and cultures through the objects stewarded by academic museums.
Works from the Continent of Africa
January 26 to August 25, 2019
Ivan Albright Gallery
This installation presented the ways in which the aesthetic values and worldviews of different African societies in the past are still relevant to the contemporary social imaginary of the vast majority of people in Africa. Whereas some museums continue to treat canonical African art as vectors of source cultures, this installation emphasized the individual autonomy of the objects on view. The selection is organized around six themes: Figures, Parliament of Masks, Power Objects, Transitions, Art of Small Things, and Art of Everyday.
From Altarpiece to Portrait: Assembling a European Art Collection
January 26, 2019, to September 6, 2020
Harrington Gallery
This installation featured highlights of the museum's European holdings in a range of media and genres. Often created to valorize, moralize, or inspire, the works originally appeared in a range of venues, from public institutions to private homes to religious buildings.
All Dolled Up
May 11 to August 11, 2019
First-Floor Corridor
Dolls can be playthings—items that help us explore everyday life and fantasy—or objects of nostalgia. This selection of photographs featured dolls in a variety of contexts, from domestic to uncanny. It included work by photographers Hans Bellmer, Olivia Parker, Senzeni Marasela, Destiny Deacon, and Ralph Meatyard, among others.
Global Contemporary: A Focus on Africa
January 26 to December 8, 2019
Dorothy and Churchill Lathrop Gallery
Global contemporary art encapsulates the practices of Western and non-Western artists alike who embody the spirit of the time. This installation presented a contemporary story of the continent of Africa through fifteen powerful works in diverse media and in myriad forms by multiple generations of artists. The works explored a range of issues, including the impact of the colonial past on present-day challenges of nation building in Africa, feminism, urbanism and infrastructural changes, globalization, forced and voluntary immigration, and environmental challenges.
Melanesian Art: The Sepik River and Abelam Hill Country
January 26 to December 8, 2019
William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Galleries
The art of Melanesia is a particular strength of the Hood Museum's collection, and the museum's primary holdings are from the island of New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific. The objects in this gallery offered a window into the region's traditional religions, people's ideas about the supernatural world, and the social relationships of people living within the traditional societies located in the Sepik River region and Abelam Hills in the northern part of the island.
A World of Relations
January 26 to December 8, 2019
William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Galleries
This selection of works from the Hood's Owen and Wagner Collection of Aboriginal Australian Art explored a series of relationships between spouses, siblings, parents, and children, as well as those bonded by shared lands or experiences. Family ties run deep in Indigenous Australian art. And yet, for Indigenous Australians, the concept of kinship is more than simply genetic: it is the basis for a complex cosmology that unites all things in the universe.
Portrait of the Artist as an Indian / Portrait of the Indian as an Artist
January 26, 2019, to February 23, 2020
Harteveldt Family Gallery
In this gallery of "portraits," contemporary Native artists offered 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.
Native Ecologies: Recycle, Resist, Protect, Sustain
January 26 to December 15, 2019
Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery
What do you see and what can you understand when you look at a piece of Native pottery made in the late 19th century? In this gallery, we asked what we might see and understand of Native and social ecologies when we look in, under, and outside the drawing, carving, tool, ceremonial object, and item of clothing—that is, Native relationships with and responsibilities to place, land, water, plants, and animals, and to family, community, and stranger.
American Art, Colonial to Modern
January 26, 2019, to August 16, 2020
Rush Family Gallery and Israel Sack Gallery
The works in these two galleries highlighted some of the social, economic, and aesthetic developments that shaped Euro-American artistic production from the colonial period to the early decades of the 20th century. These ranged from European stylistic influences and shifting taste nationally, to the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, and to such watershed events as the Civil War. The installation demonstrated how the Hood Museum continues to build a collection that speaks to a comprehensive view of American art and its regional distinctions.
The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art
January 26 to November 24, 2019
Northeast Gallery
Exchanging ideas has always motivated artists to evolve new approaches to their work. These exchanges sped up demonstrably in the early 20th century, when ships could make a transatlantic voyage in a matter of weeks, allowing New Yorkers to see the latest ideas coming out of Paris and vice versa. This gallery was dedicated to the excitement of the postwar period in New York and California, in Paris and Tokyo. It also represented the expanded participation in the art world by previously underrepresented groups, highlighting a time of emerging visual dialogues among an increasingly diverse and international group of artists who shared their work with a growing world audience.
Cubism and Its Aftershocks
January 26, 2019, to February 16, 2020
Citrin Family Gallery
For the United States, modernism in the first half of the 20th century emerged from a transatlantic dialogue among artists, writers, philosophers, and myriad other forward-looking thinkers. This gallery focused on the exchange of ideas between art centers such as Paris and New York while celebrating the contributions of individual artists.
ABOVE Looking out over the Dartmouth Green from the Engles Gallery. Photo © Michael Moran
Emulating Antiquity: Nineteenth-Century European Sculpture
January 26, 2019, to February 16, 2020
Engles Family Gallery
Powerful ancient goddesses and heroic warriors populated 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 testified 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.
Munakata at Dartmouth
January 26 to March 26, 2019
Class of 1967 Gallery
Though recognized the world over for his woodblock prints, Shiko Munakata is widely regarded in Japan as one of the nation's foremost 20th-century calligraphers—an honor of considerable significance, for calligraphy has always been the highest form of art in East Asia. This installation highlighted works collecting during and since Munakata's time as a visiting artist and lecturer at Dartmouth in 1965. It also featured pairings of several works from Utagawa Hiroshige's (1797–1858) Tokaido with Munakata's revisiting of these sites.
Narratives in Japanese Woodblock Prints
March 27 to June 9, 2019
Class of 1967 Gallery
Japanese woodblock-print artists produced numerous rich engagements with culturally resonant narratives that were often loosely based on historical events, then subsequently embellished in textual sources and their theatrical adaptations. The artists featured in this exhibition explore a wide and often gendered range of responses to those narratives' emotionally charged moral and ethical dilemmas.
New Landscapes: Contemporary Responses to Globalization
June 15 to August 18, 2019
Class of 1967 Gallery
Humanity's unceasing consumption and development has had complex repercussions on the physical, social, and cultural landscapes around the world. Artists are actively engaging with the consequences of our impacts on the planet and, in response, considering alternative realities—from imagining a transformed landscape or a dystopian future in the wake of ecological disaster to inventing new worlds to escape the effects of industrialization. This exhibition of recent acquisitions reflected on the diversity of experiences in, responses to, and projections of our many lived and potential realities.
ABOVE Installation in progress for A Space for Dialogue 92, "Consent: Complicating Agency in Photography." Photo by Rob Strong.
A Space for Dialogue
Highlighting student curatorial and educational work is a key part of the Hood Museum's mission, and nowhere is this more apparent than in A Space for Dialogue. This series of single-gallery exhibitions curated by Dartmouth students from the museum collection has been ongoing since 2002. The project forms a crucial aspect of the Hood internship as students gain valuable, hands-on curatorial experience and work closely with staff across departments. The students choose a wide range of themes, subjects, time periods, and materials for their exhibitions, showcasing the breadth and depth of both the museum's collections and Dartmouth student scholarship. Interns identify and research a topic, select objects, lay out the exhibition, write label text and a brochure, and oversee the installation. The project culminates in a public talk. There have been almost one hundred A Space for Dialogue installations since the program's inception. A Space for Dialogue was founded with support from the Class of 1948 and made possible with generous endowments from the Class of 1967, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Jr. '66, and Pamela J. Joyner '70.
A Space for Dialogue 92
Consent: Complicating Agency in Photography
January 26 to May 5, 2019
Gina Campanelli '18, Marie-Therese Cummings '18, Ashley Dotson '18, Tess McGuinness '18, Kimberly Yu '18
The concept of consent in photography is complex. Who is giving it? Who is receiving it, if anyone at all? This exhibition, curated by the Hood Museum of Art's 2017–18 interns, addressed these questions through four themes: Self Reflections, Individuals and Identities, Public Spheres, and Global Ethics.
A Space for Dialogue 93
Los Mojados: Migrant Bodies and Latinx Identities
May 11 to June 16, 2019
Armando Pulido '19
This exhibition highlighted prints and photographs from the Hood's collection that speak to the complexity of the US-Latinx experience. Ranging from migrant labor rights issues in the 1960s to the current Central American refugee crisis, these works invoked an array of cross-cultural issues though an exploration of the body and accessible media. This exhibition sought to insert Latinx art and culture into the greater historical narrative of the United States while encouraging viewers to rethink the boundaries of American art.
A Space for Dialogue 94
Society Engraved
June 22 to August 4, 2019
Jules Wheaton '19
The prints in this exhibition reflect William Hogarth's (1697–1764) pointed, shrewd, and satirical social and political commentary. This exhibition considered how while his work appealed to a broad public, its popularity prompted ethical issues around the production and distribution of prints, the right to profit from artistic labor, and the nature of what constitutes an original work of art.