The Importance of Connecting
JOHN R. STOMBERG, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director
Hood Quarterly, summer 2024
President Beilock's recent call for the College to address mental health has found a receptive audience in the faculty and staff at Dartmouth. At the Hood Museum, for example, we have long worked to normalize discussions about mental health. Our exhibitions and programs are designed to model approaches that encourage our visitors to feel comfortable addressing their struggles. And it's not only about struggles; art often instigates elation and joy, reinforcing the pleasure to be found in the world around us. We try to help people see this, and we try to help them share it.
Art, at its core, is about community, communication, and connectivity.
Art starts within a community and can reinforce the social bonds that define a group with shared experiences. These communities could be expansively defined, such as "the African American community" or "Korean" or "Catholic." In these cases, art offers community members a site in which individuals are reminded of how they relate to others within their circles. But, importantly, art also offers the means for people to get a better sense of communities with which they are not yet familiar. It presents a pathway to greater understanding between fellow citizens of the world and works to actively break down divisions that, left unaddressed, can lead to walls of miscomprehension. Artworks open up lines of communication at both the societal and individual levels.
And communication is what we are after when we think of ways to create situations that encourage respectful and positive exchanges. Often, trips to the museum occur with groups, allowing relationships to develop in a creative environment. All our Hood Museum communities—students, faculty, staff, residents of nearby towns, and arts-interested visitors from afar—can strengthen their interpersonal bonds through conversation about both the individual artworks and the many issues that come into play in our galleries.
This communication arises for lone visitors as well because perhaps the greatest contribution of art is the human connectivity it offers. When, say, a student wanders our galleries alone, they still enjoy the uplifting experience of human-to-human connection by encountering the works on view. That is the very basis of art. One person makes something; another engages with it. For this reason, we often associate time spent with art as time spent exercising empathy skills.
And at its most fundamental level, this is the Hood Museum's mission: to provide opportunities for individuals or groups to stand in front of a work of art and connect. And through that connection, people relate to one another as well as to people from around the world and throughout time. Art unleashes the power of human connectivity and offers experiences that go beyond spectatorship to a sense of belonging in the world itself.