In keeping with Dartmouth’s longstanding leadership in teaching and research related to climate and the environment, the Hood Museum of Art has developed significant holdings of art that touches on these themes, particularly in the area of contemporary photography, with works by Subhankar Banerjee, Virginia Beahan, Daniel Beltrá, Diane Burko, Edward Burtynsky, J Henry Fair, Emmet Gowin, Patricia MacDonald, David Maisel, and Ian Teh, among others.
Other works in the collection range from a 19th-century portrait of conservationist George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), Class of 1820, to modernist landscapes by Lawren Stewart Harris. A pair of studies and a photograph of the finished work document Christo and Jeanne Claude’s monumental Running Fence (1976), which dramatized the environmental impact of human activity with a twenty-four–mile fence that, for two weeks, traced the undulating contours of a California landscape like scar.
These works reinforce what Dartmouth scholars in various disciplines are discovering about the impact of human activity on the landscape, prompting new questions and conversations when they are on view. They have been used by students from a wide range of departments including geography, geology, environmental studies, Native American studies, studio art, and art history, among others.
Related Exhibitions
- Looking Back at Earth: Environmental Photography from the Hood Museum of Art
- Nature Transformed: Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context
- Water Ways: Tension and Flow
- Thin Ice: Inuit Traditions within a Changing Environment
- Okeanos, International + Contemporary Reflections on the Sea
- El Anatsui: GAWU
- Subhankar Banerjee: Resource Wars in the Arctic
Related Links
- Environmental art: works from the collection
- Online resource for teachers: Nature Transformed: Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context