ALEX BORTOLOT, Deputy Director
Hood Quarterly, summer 2025
Last summer, with the help of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Hood Museum created a map plotting all the schools, camps, and community organizations that sent groups to visit us in the past two fiscal years (our fiscal year starts in July and ends in June of the following calendar year). The array of colorful dots across New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts is a compelling visualization of our reach, which is itself a reflection of the robust relationships the institution and its staff have nurtured over the years with communities of all kinds. Behind those dots are the many preparatory exchanges our staff have with their counterparts at visiting organizations to match their interests with our offerings, and to understand any unique needs they may have that we can support. And these visits are often recurring: the Hood Museum's flagship elementary school programs, Images and Art Start, for example, bring the same students back to the Hood Museum as many as four times during the school year. Finally, the map illustrates the remarkable work our education team has done to overcome the challenges presented by COVID-19, bringing visitation back to levels that equal or exceed those prior to the pandemic.
Maps are wonderful visual tools that communicate valuable information in accessible ways, but as should be clear by now, there are limits to what they can do on their own. And we can apply the same spirit of clarity to how the Hood Museum talks about community—and what it means to map one. What do we want to illustrate? What is meaningful in terms of our mission and in the eyes of the people we serve? "Community" is generally defined as a group of people who have something in common, like a place, an identity trait, or an interest. In practical terms, the objective "what" is the easy part—we can count how many visits we receive from Dartmouth students or K–12 groups, for example. But communities are created and sustained through relationships, and one's feeling of belonging within a given community, the strength and sense of self one draws from it, is often reflective of what one puts into it. How do we map the strength of our community ties rather than, say, their breadth? In 2025, we are launching two new initiatives to help us gauge the strength of our relationships by asking our visitors to rate their sense of belonging at the Hood Museum, and whether visiting us in turn makes them feel more connected to their communities.
These questions are especially relevant as the museum marks its fortieth anniversary. We should certainly celebrate the extent of our reach—we attract physical and digital visitors from across the globe—but we should also note with satisfaction our role in forming and strengthening the many communities of which we are part through our sustained engagement with people near at hand and far afield.