Exhibitions Archive
A Brew of Cultural Symbolism, Solace, and Introspection
Coffee and Tea in ArtFor centuries, coffee and tea have served as primary staples in daily life to stimulate productivity and foster community. This exhibition explores how their cultural symbolism is reflected in art. At times, artists feature coffee and tea to represent stability and reflect broad, popular sentiment. Their routine enjoyment across cultures also offers a unique artistic window onto the self and our everyday experiences.
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.
Across time and cultures, gold has served as a metaphor for what we value most. Symbolically, it stands in for goodness, excellence, brilliance, and wealth. Specifically, the artists represented in this traveling exhibition turn to gilding as a means to reconsider our value systems. Gilding images of graffiti and sidewalks, cardboard boxes and architectural fragments, they ask us to see the beauty in what we so often overlook and honor that which we so often throw away. If, as the saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold,” the artists represented here offer an inverse proposition: perhaps that which does not always shine is most worthy of our attention.
Emphasizing the role of women artists and feminine aesthetics in crafting African and African diaspora art histories, this exhibition surveys themes of home, kinship, motherhood, femininity, and intimacy in both historic and contemporary works. Homecoming breaks free of the binary traditional/contemporary to instead dwell at the interstices of history, futurity, and spirituality over the past two centuries.
Gender, Belonging, and Nationhood
Sports CultureThis exhibition explores the ways in which identity is invented and intertwined through athletics. The works move beyond their individual subjects to examine the impact of sports upon the formulation and imposition of collective identities across space, time, and people. Spanning from the 19th through the 21st centuries, this exhibit explores topics such as cultural pride, the assertion of state power, collective nationality, and gender expectations.
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.
Relaxation and Resistance
And I'm Feeling Good
Featuring selections from the Hood Museum's photography collection, And I’m Feeling Good: Relaxation and Resistance celebrates joy in African American life. Simultaneously, it considers the pleasures and challenges in achieving and maintaining that “good feeling” in the United States.
Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer refers to the process through which shared beliefs, concepts, customs, and rituals are distributed. This exhibition explores how art mediates the communication of cultural information through specific material practices and visual registers that have their own history: Indigenous Australian dot painting, ledger drawing, performance, photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking.