Hood Quarterly, autumn/winter 2011-12
This past year, along with many generous individual donations of works of art, the Hood Museum of Art received a number of significant group gifts. These works from patrons and donors will add significantly to both our contemporary and our photography collections. In addition to the gifts listed here, we also received a gift of five works from the Sam Francis Foundation and an exchange of twelve color lithographs by the Nicaraguan painter and printmaker Armando Morales (born 1927) from the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin.
A Gift of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Photographs from the Parnassus Foundation
The museum's photography collection has been growing steadily over the past decade, thanks to the interest and dedication of a number of Dartmouth collectors and donors. Recently the Parnassus Foundation, under the auspices of Raphael and Jane Bernstein P'87 and '89, presented a significant gift of sixty-six photographs to the museum by such practitioners as nineteenth-century British photographer Peter Henry Emerson (see illustration) and modern and contemporary photographers Edward Burtynsky, Serge Hambourg, Sandi Fellman, Evelyn Hofer, George Platt Lynes, Brian Merrett, Ray Kruger Metzger, Stephen Shore, Josef Sudek, and George Tice. The gift includes a particularly large number of works by Emerson and Metzger. Emerson (1856–1936), who was born in Cuba and raised partly in the United States, was a physician, scientist, and early expert in a type of photographic process that produced platinum prints, which allows for soft gradations of tonal value that are particularly evocative in his beautiful landscapes. The works in the Parnassus Foundation gift are from Emerson's series Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broad, which he produced as his first album in 1886.
Charles E. Dorkey III Gift of Contemporary Photography
Charles E. Dorkey III, Class of 1970, has generously donated a collection of forty-nine works of contemporary photography, including twenty-eight works by internationally respected artist Donna Ferrato. A documentary photographer, Ferrato is perhaps best known for her ability to capture complex moments in human interactions and relationships. In her ongoing series 10013, Ferrato has turned her camera on the Tribeca neighborhood in New York City, where she has lived since 1997. Leonard Street Urchins (2009) features local boys playing a game of catch on the new cobblestones of Leonard Street. These raw, energetic, black-and-white images document the reconstruction of the area after 9/11 and expose the understated, quiet side of one of Manhattan's oldest residential neighborhoods.
Trevor Fairbrother and John T. Kirk Gift of Modern and Contemporary Art
Trevor Fairbrother, a curator and writer interested in nineteenth-century American, modern, and contemporary art, and John T. Kirk, a renowned specialist in American furniture and decorative arts, have given thirty-six modern and contemporary photographs, drawings, and objects to the museum by artists including Carl Chiarenza, Jess Collins, Chris Enos, Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, Louise Lawler, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Catherine Opie, Ad Reinhardt, Gary Schneider, Andy Warhol (see illustration), and Tom Wesselmann. Their gift enriches the Hood's collection by introducing prominent new artists and new works to Dartmouth's modern and contemporary holdings.
Gift of Contemporary Art from Hugh Freund
Last fall the Hood received a gift of fifteen contemporary works of art from longtime donor and board member Hugh Freund '67. Mostly works on paper, this gift includes two prints by celebrated South African filmmaker William Kentridge. The two Kentridge etchings initially appear similar, encouraging viewers to look closely in order to distinguish the various ways the artist has layered and reworked his subject. Issues of process and perception are also present in James Casebere's haunting photograph of four flooded arches. The subject is a slave factory in West Africa, but the figureless image is not of the building itself but rather of a detailed model that Casebere carefully constructed. From Matthew Ritchie's complex mythology to Amy Cutler's whimsical commentary on female bodies and fashion to Lee Walton's abstract recording of a Red Sox game, these works allow students, scholars, and viewers the opportunity to explore the wide variety of media, subjects, and issues in contemporary art.
Stephen, Harley, and Bart Osman Gift of Photographs by Ilse Bing
Harley and Stephen Osman, Class of 1956, Tuck1957, and their son Bart Osman, Class of 1990, Tuck 1996, have given twenty-five works by German photographer Ilse Bing (1899–1998) to the Hood. Bing used a small-format Leica camera to capture scenes of Paris and New York, where she moved in 1941. She also shot fashion photographs for Harper's Bazaar, for example the Gold Lamé Shoes (1935), and still-lifes. Influenced by surrealism, abstract painting, and photojournalism, Bing played with creating geometric compositions out of recognizable subjects.
The Wise Collection
Joanne and Doug Wise, Class of 1959, have made a generous gift to the museum of thirty Japanese and Japanese-inspired contemporary prints, drawings, and ceramics by such artists as Keiko Hara, Hachiro Iizuka, Makato Fujimura, and Yutaka Yoshinaga. Joanne and Doug lived in Japan between 1978 and 1982 and began to collect at the time. With their move to Houston, Joanne began to represent Japanese graphic artists and ceramicists and actively promoted their work through a quarterly newsletter and her efforts with the Texas Print Alliance. She states: "The Wise Collection exists to bring people of the world together with greater knowledge and appreciation of Japanese art." Her and Doug's gift to the collection will be particularly useful for teaching the art of printmaking and drawing and will add to the Hood's growing collection of contemporary ceramics and Japanese art.