Past Exhibitions

This summer, whenever the museum is open, visitors of all ages are invited to drop by Make Space, an art activity space in Engles Gallery. Taking inspiration from the adjacent exhibition Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art, visitors can create sculptural paper flowers to contribute to an in-gallery community garden wall. All are welcome.

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Inspired by flowers, North American artists working across time, cultural traditions, and artistic styles have embraced floral beauty in the natural world. Beyond the Bouquet highlights works from the permanent collection that showcase how artists’ explorations of joy, ritual, and knowledge through flowers can touch our own lives and shared experiences.

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Inspired by theorist Guy Debord's 1967 book Society of the Spectacle, the exhibition Separation Perfected examines the paradox of our hyper-connected yet isolating world. In particular, it traces the shift from physical spaces to digital realms, where mediated images have increasingly replaced genuine connections. Through works spanning from the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, the exhibition questions how technology and capitalism have transformed visibility into a commodity, promoting exposure over authentic interaction. By navigating these visual landscapes, Separation Perfected invites viewers to reflect on what may be lost in a world where connection is abundant, yet true presence remains elusive.

A Space for Dialogue is a student-curated exhibition program that began in 2001. Hood Museum of Art interns create an installation drawn from the museum's permanent collection by engaging with every aspect of curation, from doing research and selecting objects, to choosing frames and a wall color, to planning a layout and writing labels and a brochure, to giving a public talk. There have been over 100 A Space for Dialogue exhibitions on a wide variety of themes.  

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In honor of the Hood Museum’s 40th anniversary, we present New Directions: Connection and Curatorial Practice, an exhibition that demonstrates the values that shape our curatorial approach. Around a signature new acquisition, Diedrick Brackens’s infernal garden, we have installed art from disparate times and cultures. Though seemingly quite different, each of these surrounding works relates to Brackens’s art, whether by virtue of weaving technique and color choice or environmental concerns and religious iconography.

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Visual Kinship explores how photography defines, challenges, and reimagines the concept of family. Across diverse historical and contemporary works, the exhibition examines how images reflect and disrupt family structures shaped by colonialism, migration, transnational adoption, and queer intimacies. Photography plays a pivotal role in bridging the personal and political, offering a lens through which kinship can be recognized, claimed, and contested. The exhibition also considers how visual culture fosters alternative networks of belonging and care, expanding the notion of family beyond biological or traditional frameworks.

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Every generation remakes art history. As students brush off dusty analytical tools and reanimate enduring cultural questions, the discipline acquires new urgency—and new relevance. This teaching exhibition, mounted in conjunction with an advanced seminar for departmental majors offered in fall 2025, invites students to rethink the methods and materials of their scholarly craft. Rarely shown and understudied, the objects gathered here represent "hidden gems" from the Hood Museum's collection. Together, these unfamiliar images and forms invite us to reflect on issues from racialization to migration. And they encourage us to reconsider art's canonical histories, to see across space and time. Can a contemporary Ethiopian photographic print unsettle our view of an 18th-century British painting? What does a 16th-century German engraving have in common with a modern Native American painting?

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