White Dreams

Inscriptions

Signed, titled, and dated, on reverse: Marisol 1968

Label

An enigmatic face emerges from darkness, offering a white carnation in its mouth. Where has it come from and what is the meaning of this intimate gesture? The artist has used a cast of her own face, as was common in her practice at the time. Marisol created White Dreams in 1968, the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were murdered. In a 2001 interview, she said that White Dreams “was a metaphor for the hopes of black people.” What do we make of this attempt at solidarity fifty-six years later? She has also described the white flower as an ironic reference to Spanish dancers. With its overlapping allusions to the personal and the political, perhaps the work can be best understood through Marisol’s own words: “a work of art is like a dream where all the characters, no matter in what disguise, are part of the dreamer.”

From the 2024 exhibition Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined, curated by Amelia Kahl, Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming and Neely McNulty, Hood Foundation Curator of Education

Exhibition History

Acquisitions 1974-1978 Jaffe-Friede, Strauss & Barrows Galleries, Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 8, 1978-January 21, 1979.

American Flowers, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire, Janaury 29-February 15, 1982.

Art from the Vice-President's House from Northeast Museums, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York, March 6-13, 1979.

Artist as Object/Subject, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Art History 2, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 18, 1999-March 12, 2000.

Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined, Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 13-December 15, 2024.

Late and Post-Modernism: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Art History 55, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, May 5-June 18, 1995.

Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., April 5-August 11, 1991.

Second Stage of Modernism: Art from 1945 to the present, William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall, Churchill P. Lanthrop, Friends, and Owen Robertson Cheatham Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 6-August 16, 1987.

The Jay Wolf Bequest of Contemporary Art, Beaumont-May Gallery, Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 24-August 28, 1977.

Publication History

Mamoru Yonekura, Contemporary Great Masters: Marisol, Tokyo: Kodansha, Ltd., 1993, ill. 28.

Nancy Grove, Magical Mixtures: Marosil Portrait Sculpture, Washington D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1991, p. 70-71, no. 14.

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Pandora, 1981, ill. cover.

Provenance

Julius (Jay) Rosenthal Wolf (1929-1976), Class of 1951, New York, New York; given to present collection, 1976.

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Subjects