Hood Quarterly, winter 2013
Michael Taylor, Director
We have an exhilarating year ahead at the Hood Museum of Art, beginning this winter with the opportunity for our visitors to engage further with the important exhibition Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art. In this issue of the Hood Quarterly, we feature an interview with Will Owen, donor with Harvey Wagner of the Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art, which reveals the collectors' extraordinary dedication to and profound knowledge of the art of Aboriginal Australia. The opening of the exhibition this past September was an enormous success, and we continue to be thankful for Will Owen and Harvey Wagner's generosity and vision in donating this world-class collection to the Hood. We could not be more honored and privileged to accept this collection for the study and benefit of our museum visitors in perpetuity, and I urge you to visit the exhibition and attend some of the related programs that we have organized for the winter months.
Also in this issue we are pleased to introduce a new and exciting recurring feature titled Alumni Voices, in which Dartmouth graduates working in the arts share their perspectives and scholarship with our readers. To launch this series, we have invited Tricia Paik '91, a specialist on the art of Ellsworth Kelly and a curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, to write about the artist's Dartmouth Panels. In the next issue, Stacey Sell '85, Associate Curator of Old Master Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will be writing about two important Old Master prints, one by Dürer and one by Rembrandt, that have been donated to the museum as a bequest from the Adolph Weil Jr. Collection.
Building, preserving, cataloguing, and exhibiting the collection is at the core of the Hood Museum of Art's mission to teach with original works of art. This goal is made possible through the extraordinary depth and quality of our holdings, which cover an ever-widening range of historical time periods and cultures. We carefully consider how potential new acquisitions will strengthen our teaching mission, and invite you to celebrate their selection with us by regularly featuring new acquisition highlights in the Hood Quarterly. In this issue, we are delighted to share with you our most recent acquisitions of works by the French seventeenth-century artist Jacques Bellange, the American modernist painter Marguerite Zorach, and Faith Ringgold and April Gornik, two of the most respected and influential artists working today.
We have received a tremendous response to the last issue of the Hood Quarterly, in which we began coverage of our ambitious plans for the museum's future by interviewing Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects chosen by Dartmouth College to renovate and expand the museum's current facility, as well as the adjacent historic Wilson Hall. Planning for this project, which will see the museum double its gallery space and triple the number of its classrooms through the addition of a new Museum Learning Center, is well underway. I look forward to sharing Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's breathtaking and highly innovative designs for the expansion with you in an upcoming issue of the Hood Quarterly.
Whether you are a Dartmouth student or faculty member, a first-time or regular visitor from the Upper Valley or beyond, there has never been a better time to visit and get involved with the Hood, either by joining our membership program or attending our exhibitions and programs, which are free and open to all. I trust that your next visit to the museum will be an enjoyable one and look forward to keeping you informed about the imminent renovation and expansion of the Hood Museum of Art.
In This Issue:
- Alumni Voices: New Ellsworth Kelly Commission Enlivens Arts District
- The Hood Celebrates the Arrival of Louise Bourgeois's Celebrated Sculpture Crouching Spider
- The Beauty of Bronze: Selections from the Hood Museum of Art
- A Collector's Perspective: An Interview with Will Owen
- Recent Acquistions: Faith Ringgold, People's Flag Show, 1970, and United States of Attica, 1971–72
- Recent Acquistions: Marguerite Thompson Zorach, Mountain Stream, about 1917
- Recent Acquistions: Jacques Bellange, The Raising of Lazarus, about 1612–16
- Recent Acquistions: April Gornik, Untitled (Desert Vista), 1980
- Welcome to the 2012–13 Hood interns!
- Bart Thurber Joins the Staff of the Princeton University Art Museum
- In Memoriam: Evie Kaiser
- Community of Learners: K-12 Teacher Training