An interview with Richard Stucker, acting director of the Dartmouth College Museum and Galleries
ALISON PALIZZOLO
Head of Communications, Content, and Brand
Hood Quarterly, fall 2025
In January 2025, in honor of the Hood Museum's 40th anniversary, the communications team solicited museum audiences for their memories of the Hood Museum. Via a Google form, we heard this from a contributor named Richard in Hanover, New Hampshire: "I was part of a small team instrumental in planning, constructing, and staffing the original Hood Museum [and] worked closely with the architect, Charles Moore . . . There are too many memories to share in this short response, but I would be willing to elaborate if you are interested in hearing from me about those exciting formative years in creating the Hood Museum of Art." Of course, we had to call him! A few months later, my colleague Isabelle Scottlind and I interviewed Richard Stucker at the museum.
Alison Palizzolo [AP]: Please tell us about your connection to the Hood Museum.
Richard Stucker [RS]: I came to Dartmouth with my wife in 1975, having worked previously in three art museums: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, IN. I was invited to be the associate director of the Hopkins Center in part because I had a visual arts background, which doesn't seem right for a performing arts institution, but the Hood Museum was already on the table at Dartmouth—it was being thought of conceptually. Even though I didn't have experience in the performing arts, I had a lot of experience in the visual arts and museum administration. The College administration thought I could be helpful in planning and getting the Hood Museum off the ground. As associate director of the Hop, I oversaw financial management, personnel, and facilities.
AP: What was the "Dartmouth College Museum and Galleries" like before the Hood Museum became a reality?
RS: Long before the Hood Museum, there was a museum program at Dartmouth. It was a small fraction of what the Hood Museum has become, but there were always objects on display. There was, as far as I know, always someone in charge and almost always a staff of sorts, and there were traveling exhibitions. As you can imagine, without the current Hood Museum building, space was a critical issue. The spaces on campus that more or less comprised the Dartmouth College Museum and Galleries were Wilson Hall, which had mostly ethnographic objects, the second floor of Carpenter Hall, which had two or three galleries that were quite nice, and the Jaffe-Friede Gallery in the Hop. The traveling exhibitions were primarily installed in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery, and there was the Lower Jewett Corridor, and other spaces scattered around campus.
The differences between then and now went beyond where objects were exhibited. For example, Dartmouth students—I'm almost embarrassed to say—had very little input in the process. The only budget to speak of was for personnel and thirty to forty thousand dollars a year to be spent for traveling shows. The staff was made up of between six and nine people, depending on the period of time. Perhaps most importantly, the museum didn't have much sway. All non-curricular arts on campus reported through the director of the Hopkins Center, and in my years that was Peter Smith, the man who hired me.
AP: Was there teaching with original works of art happening or was it more of a social space?
RS: Here is where I get slightly critical, even self-critical. The relationship between faculty, art historians, anthropologists, and use of the collection was relatively distant. There wasn't space to lay out objects for examination by faculty, students, or even museum staff.
AP: Prior to 1985, what was the Hop's relationship to the museum?
RS: Not long before I came to Dartmouth, Jan van der Marck became the director of the Dartmouth College Museum and Galleries, and he was here for approximately six years. Peter Smith was not only a dear friend and mentor but also an active promoter of the creation of the Hood Museum. Jan was focused on cutting-edge art, not historical Western art. If you go back and look at an old course catalog, there wasn't a single offering or mention of non-Western or contemporary art. Jan, on the other hand, was focused on "art of the day." He personally collected Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, and Mark di Suvero's X-Delta, and for Dartmouth he commissioned Beverly Pepper to create Thel. He brought a modern aesthetic to the College.
AP: Why did the College want to build a proper museum?
RS: We were late in the Ivy League and certainly among other private institutions to have a fine arts museum. Harvard, Smith, and even smaller schools like Mount Holyoke all had art museums. Also, we were simply running out of space on campus to exhibit and store works of art. No one was against the project; everyone was in favor of it—in spirit anyhow.
Harvey Hood left, I think, a $10 million gift to Dartmouth for "a major educational institution." In the end, the first Hood Museum cost around $14 million to construct. The heart of it was the $10 million from the Hood family. The final cost included the interior connector between the Hopkins Center and the Hood Museum, for which I was responsible. I worked with Charles Moore to move the box office from the entrance of the Hop to the middle of the building. He and I completely reorganized how food service was dealt with and created a whole new environment at the intersection of the performing and visual arts.
AP: What were some hurdles that you faced while planning the project?
RS: Webster Hall—now Rauner Library—was one of the locations discussed. It was the most prominent and had great visibility. It made sense in certain conceptual but not practical ways. Some of us thought it would be wonderful to have the arts flanking the Green with performing arts to the south and visual arts to the north. Obviously that didn't happen. There were conflicts, most importantly coming to agreement whether the Hood Museum should be encyclopedic in scope, and what emphasis to place on ethnographic art. I sat in several meetings listening to discussions. In the end, it became clear that the Hood must be as inclusive as possible.
There were only two conceivable locations that we felt would satisfy the Hood family's request for a "presence" on the Green. The first was where the Hood Museum is currently situated and the second was where the Hop has now expanded. I mean, where else? Even though the site was imperfect, it wasn't a hard decision to make. To create a space for the museum to have a presence on the Green was a serious challenge for all of us planning the new museum.
AP: How did you come to be acting director of the Hood Museum of Art?
RS: When Jan left in around 1980, a search was organized for the first director of the new Hood Museum. There were two failed searches. You can imagine, it is really hard to find a museum director when you don't have a building and the collections are scattered. Also, whomever we hired would have to oversee the construction of the building. That's not what museum directors—or curators aspiring to be directors—want to deal with. So, I became acting director from 1980 to 1982. During my time, we installed a couple of modest exhibits. However, for the most part, I was involved with coordinating the architect search committee (consisting of faculty and administrators), the hiring of Charles Moore, working with faculty, and trying to put out metaphorical fires.
AP: What was it like to work with Charles Moore?
RS: I think we interviewed four or five architectural firms. Not all of the candidates but many of them presented themselves as immediate experts on location and scope of the project. By contrast, Charles Moore was a charmer. He was great. He was easy to be with. He was relaxed. He had also recently completed the Williams College Museum of Art. When the committee asked him where he would construct the museum, he said, "How would I know where to put it? I just got here."
AP: What do you think of the new Hood Museum?
RS: I'm anxious about answering that question because I put so much work into Moore's original construction. When the expansion was announced, I was apprehensive, but I love the new museum! I think the architects did an incredible job of embracing Charles Moore's architecture while adding space and creating the new environment. I'm a museum person and have visited the Phoenix Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, both of which were designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Not knowing that the same architects would get this job, I fell in love with those places—and this one too.
AP: What are Dartmouth's and your professional connections to the Montshire Museum?
RS: The collection in Wilson Hall largely consisted of objects contributed by alums over many years. Much of the collection consisted of beetles, shells, mollusks, and tusks, as well as a lot of handmade material, mostly from African nations. Objects and artifacts continued to pile up without curation. Not long before the Hood Museum opened, the collections were divided between objects we wanted to maintain for the Hood Museum and those which would form the foundation of the newly created Montshire Museum of Science.
While working at Dartmouth, I became a trustee of the then-forming Montshire Museum; I think I was the only trustee who had a background in museum management. I didn't have deep pockets, so I wasn't one of the donors, but I was there to help it understand its purpose, mission, and potential. I left Dartmouth and was in Buffalo for a year, where I became the director of Art Services for SUNY Buffalo and helped set the stage to build a major arts center there. My wife and I subsequently returned to the Upper Valley, and I became the associate director at the Montshire. I held that position for 19 years until my retirement at age 65. I played a large role in the original construction and subsequent expansions. The Montshire Museum is a great success story.
This interview was originally conducted in-person and recorded on April 22, 2025. It has been transcribed, edited, and condensed for the reader.