Past Exhibitions

The fifteen prints in this gallery represent the Hood Museum of Art’s ongoing efforts to develop its collection of Japanese woodblock prints as a teaching resource. With publication dates ranging from the 1750s through the 1930s, these prints document several aspects of Japan’s woodblock print culture. This selection features prints in a wide variety of formats representing major print genres including kabuki actor prints (yakusha-e), pictures of fashionable women (bijinga), perspective prints (uki-e), landscape prints (fūkeiga), warrior prints (musha-e), pictures of foreigners residing in Yokohama (Yokohama-e), prints depicting Japan’s late-nineteenth-century modernization (kaika-e), and early-twentieth-century prints (shin hanga).

 

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Many aspects of the lives of ancient Greek women remain a mystery to us today. While surviving literary sources and artifacts often feature powerful female goddesses, images and texts describing the lives of everyday, or "real," Greek women are more difficult to identify and understand. This exhibition presents three objects that depict those women.

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The artists selected for this exhibition express the melancholic condition within a contemporary context and raise questions about what distinguishes melancholy today. In a society of constant sensory stimulation, instant gratification, and hedonistic saturation, have happiness and satisfaction become an obligation? Have we attained the object of our desire but lost the reason for its desirability? Through their deliberate interpretations of melancholic subjects and settings, the artists in this exhibition realize the vitality that emerges as the melancholic sees opportunities everywhere to mourn this lost desire. In fact, melancholy's redemption lies precisely within those infinitely unfolding creative and intellectual possibilities that it reveals.

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This exhibition highlights the extraordinary Owen and Wagner Collection at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, through its display of more than one hundred works of contemporary Indigenous art from Australia. These objects are by artists from outback communities as well as major metropolitan centers and span five decades of creative activity. They also represent the many art-making practices of Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent, including acrylic paintings on linen and canvas, earthen ochre paintings on bark, board, and canvas, and sculpture in a variety of media. While the exhibition features many influential artists who have contributed to the development of an Indigenous art canon since the 1970s, the focus is squarely on subsequent generations of artists, who are breathing new life into ancient stories and broadening the possibilities of Indigenous art. The exhibition therefore also includes contemporary paintings that recall the ancestral narratives of the Dreaming as well as photographs from urban-based artists who depict the contemporary realities of Indigenous people from Australia. Resonant with cultural memory, these objects reference and reinvigorate customary iconographies, speak to the history and legacy of colonization, and affirm Robert Hughes's statement that Aboriginal art is "the last great art movement of the twentieth century."

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Night Hunter House, a recent Hood acquisition now on view for the first time, is by Denver-based multimedia artist Stacey Steers. The dollhouse is conceived around and incorporates segments from Steers's sixteen-minute handmade film Night Hunter (2011) on ten small HDTV screens embedded in the house. Visitors who peek into the rooms through the house's windows are exposed to a surreal world filled with snakes, giant moths, pulsating eggs, and strange happenings. Silent film star Lillian Gish (1893–1993) has been transported from several of her best-known films to become the dweller of the house and the film's protagonist through Steers's expert collage artistry.

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The written narrative is the most valued form of knowledge production throughout modern Western history. This has significant implications for, among others, African American slaves, who were systematically denied participation in written discourse. It is not only a question of who has written history, but more importantly, who can? And how? With this background as a rich framework for critique, text as image has in turn become a powerful tool for artists interested in illuminating the dominant ways of manufacturing narratives and claiming knowledge.

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