Hood Quarterly, summer 2003
During the Spring 2003 term, MARGARET ARCHULETA (Pueblo/Hispanic) came to the Hood Museum of Art as Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Visiting Scholar to make recommendations for the development and curricular use of modern and contemporary Native American art. Ms. Archuleta, formerly Curator of Fine Art at the Heard Museum, is an independent curator who came to Dartmouth College in 2002–2003 as the Gordon Russell Visiting Professor in the Native American Studies Program. Her gallery talk, "Hampton's Indian Program: An Experiment in Indian Education," provided a historical background to accompany the Hood Museum's exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project.
DAVID GETSY, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College, specializes in the history and theory of sculpture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In late January, Dr. Getsy presented an evening gallery talk that focused on several works currently on view in the museum. In addition, he has encouraged students to make frequent use of the relevant collections of the Hood Museum of Art in order to supplement course lectures and develop research papers.
In 2005, the museum will present Marks of Distinction:Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art, an exhibition accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue written by museum staff. With the financial support of the Henry Luce Foundation, MARK MITCHELL was hired last September as a one-year curatorial assistant for this ambitious undertaking. A recent Ph.D. graduate from Princeton University with extensive experience with American works on paper, Mark brings great knowledge and terrific research and writing skills to this project. As a result of his efforts, the Hood already has a far greater understanding of the history, provenance, and original function of works in the collection by such diverse artists as Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, and Thomas Hart Benton.
The Hood is presently cataloguing Dartmouth's collection of historic scientific instruments, one of the oldest and largest at a North American institution of higher learning. Visiting Curator DAVID PANTALONY came to the Hood from the University of Toronto, where he did his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science. During his graduate work, he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and created a museum of historic instruments at Toronto. Pantalony and history professor Rich Kremer taught a freshman seminar this spring on the material culture of science. Their students mounted an exhibition from the Hood collection in Rauner Special Collections Library.