Past Exhibitions

On view for just five weeks this summer, the Hood's installation of Burning as It Were a Lamp (2013) introduces Miami-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya to the community. This immersive installation consists of two paintings, a weeping bronze boy, and mirrors. The work only fully reveals itself when the viewer enters—and is reflected in—the mirrored space. Martínez Celaya is in residence at Dartmouth for the month of July and will present both a public lecture and a gallery talk in conjunction with his visit.

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Small-scale contemporary art has often been ignored or trivialized by scholars and critics. This exhibition looks at seven works that reveal different strategies for rejecting conventional artistic standards. Some of these artists appropriate "insignificant" materials—either everyday or ephemeral in nature—while others employ a hybridized practice to break down traditional institutional boundaries between "high" and "low" art.

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Organized in collaboration with the Studio Art Department, this exhibition celebrates the important history and legacy of the Artist-in-Residence Program at Dartmouth College, which began in 1931 when the Guatemalan painter Carlos Sánchez, Class of 1923, was invited back to campus on a year-long fellowship. The exhibition showcases the work of more than eighty artists who have participated in this acclaimed international program since that time, including Charles Burwell, Walker Evans, Louise Fishman, Allan Houser, Donald Judd, Magdalene Odundo, José Clemente Orozco, Robert Rauschenberg, Alison Saar, Paul Sample, and Frank Stella, whose presence on campus has undoubtedly enhanced the vitality of the arts at Dartmouth.

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This gallery presents a selection of contemporary and traditional Native American art in conjunction with Vera Palmer’s course Perspectives in Native American Studies. Vera Palmer frequently discusses many of these objects with her students to underscore the multiple forms of expression employed by Native American artists. Many of these works provide an opportunity to explore issues of identity, education, assimilation, and violence.

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In Chauvet, France, red ochre handprints and stencils are found in chambers throughout the Pont-d'Arc Cave. These are the oldest known representations of the human impulse to make marks, to bring pigment to surface. A common hypothesis: these hands are a form of early signature. And so on through history, with the hand being created into a distinct visual trope again and again. Think of Egyptian hieroglyphs and how they look so distinctly Egyptian. Look at the Assyrian hands on their carved reliefs, and notice how clearly Assyrian. Or even Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael—all are of the same style, yet each produces a distinguishable hand. The hand, for all of its biological constancy of form, is vulnerable to flourishes of expression like few other body parts.

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Museum collections usually form in one of two ways—either by gifts or through curatorial purchases.  At a college or university museum, however, faculty members can also influence purchases of works of art and material culture that reflect their research and teaching interests.

This installation of African art from the Hood Museum of Art presents a selection of objects that marks the trajectory of the collection's development and pays tribute to some of the people who shaped it. From the son of an early Dartmouth president to a professor in Dartmouth's anthropology department; from donors whose love of African art is reflected in the quality of the works they gifted to three curators who acquired memorable and important works during their tenures—all have contributed the Hood's mission to teach Dartmouth undergraduates and visitors of all ages about the diverse and rich art of the many cultures of this continent.

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