JOHN STOMBERG
Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director
From the day its doors opened, Hood Downtown has been a magnet on Main Street for campus, community, and regional schools. Hood Downtown's rotating schedule of contemporary art exhibitions and robust programming helped us maintain our strong connections with Dartmouth and the public. Like most good ideas, the experiment yielded some unanticipated wins that will inform our practice moving forward.
With a shaded bench and flower beds out front and its wall of windows, the exhibition space had curb appeal, making it easy to capitalize on the visibility of being on Main Street. Visitor services staff regularly remarked on the many unplanned visitors who, strolling by en route to somewhere else, peered through the window, walked in, and lingered with the art. We also heard from schoolteachers who reported that—after class visits to Hood Downtown—their students returned regularly with their parents, because "it's easy and fun to be on Main Street. There's ice cream next door."
Teaching in a light-filled space, steps away from the street, also allowed us to make our teaching practice visible. Anyone who ventured inside when students were present saw active engagement: Dartmouth professors lookingmclosely at the work and in dialogue with their students, other learners talking to each other quietly in groups, sprawled out on the floor, or drawing from works of art. Indeed, Hood Downtown has been critically important to maintaining our relationship with Dartmouth faculty and students during the museum's closure. While some classes have visited consistently throughout the two years—including those in the Writing and Rhetoric, Studio Art, and French and Italian Departments—the diversity of exhibitions has attracted a wide range of classes from different disciplines. Laetitia Soulier: The Fractal Architectures appealed to architecture and photography students, while Ingo Günther: World Processor was relevant to a math class in introductory statistics, and we worked closely with the Music Department during Resonant Spaces: Sound Art at Dartmouth. The show that reached most deeply into the curriculum was Kader Attia: Reason's Oxymorons. Students from ten different departments (Religion, Psychology, Art History, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, African and African American Studies, History, Film, Anthropology, and Classical Studies) engaged with the work.
In addition, the design and size of Hood Downtown contributed to our teaching success with regional schools. The floating wall in the middle created two gathering spaces for conversation sized to the scale of an average room. Regional school groups benefited from being in a smaller space. As one of our multiplevisit program partners, Nancy Boymer of Barnard Academy, put it, "Hood Downtown has been a great alternative to the museum. Having a smaller, more intimate space made the exhibits more accessible to young students. There's a benefit to having an exhibit of one artist's work, as well. The students can be 100% focused on each exhibit and engage with works up close in a way that feels different from our experience in the museum."
One of the most important aspects of Hood Downtown was access to contemporary artists. Each term the featured artists met with Dartmouth classes—frequently upper-level Dartmouth studio art courses, but also others, such as when painter Bahar Behbahani spoke to the English class Immigrant Women Writing in America. Since Hood Downtown opened in the fall of 2016, 42 Dartmouth classes with 612 students have visited. From Sex, Gender, and Society students looking at the photographs in Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic, to students in Why People Believe in Weird Things: Credulity, Science and Pseudoscience in the Study of Human Behavior discussing the videos of Kader Attia, Hood Downtown has stimulating looking, listening, and learning across the curriculum. Kelly McConnell, a senior lecturer in French, writes: "Students routinely express how much they appreciate the opportunity to use their French outside the classroom in a new and enriching context. I see their investment in the language and content increase when they start to make connections with the world outside of the textbook."
Showing the work of a diverse array of contemporary artists has always been a goal of the museum. Several of the Hood Downtown artists had never had a one-person show at a museum, while others are well established internationally. The public program series Conversations and Connections drew on their presence at Dartmouth and encouraged an exchange of ideas that isn't possible with a lecture, and once again, the smaller space worked to our advantage for these types of more intimate exchanges. In addition, we also invited faculty to give gallery talks and write essays for the Hood Downtown brochures, a way to bring the insights and expertise of these professors to a public forum.
There are too many wonderful exchanges between visiting artists and the public to call out here, but one stands out for area high schoolers who met with Bahar Behbahani. Standing in front of a wall of her paintings, Bahar invited students to "explain a painting, what it is communicating, the moods and emotions, without using color labels." She challenged them to speak metaphorically and with nuance, as well as take a risk to share their response to her work, not what they expected from their visit. There were silences and pauses, but they all found their way.