Description

Dartmouth College opened the Hood Museum of Art in 1985 with the aim of consolidating the college’s sizable art collections and rendering them accessible to students and faculty.  Today, the collection numbers more than 65,000 works across a broad spectrum of cultures and historical periods, with important holdings of American, European, African, and Melanesian art, and a strong focus on Native American art.  In recent years, the Hood has significantly advanced its mission to engage with faculty, students, campus organizations, and audiences throughout the region, and to encourage the exploration of cultures and the human condition through art.  Before its current, temporary closure, the museum was hosting more than 2,000 students each year in its single study-storage room, in classes from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, biology, and engineering.  It additionally was providing, annually, more than 100 special programs, exhibitions, lectures, and gallery talks, for the college and the general public.
 
 With the aim of expanding the depth and reach of its activities, and particularly the accessibility of its collections, the Hood is now in the process of a $50 million expansion and renovation led by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and slated for completion in 2019.  The project‘s addition of 21,000 square feet (an increase of 50 percent) will result in five new galleries (for a total of sixteen), will triple the object-study rooms with the creation of a Center for Object-Based Inquiry, and will yield a new lobby and concourse to function as a crossroads for students and a venue for academic and public events.  The expansion is expected to raise the number of student visits to 6,000 a year, and dramatically increase public visitation.
 
 The proposed grant would fund the installation of six galleries devoted to the Hood’s substantial collection of American art, which numbers 20,000 objects.  Having originated with the founding of the college, the collection has grown at a rapid pace over the last three decades, owing to new acquisitions funds and a bounty of gifts.  Highlights from these holdings have been published in two collection catalogues that also accompanied exhibitions: American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (2007) and the Luce–funded Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art (2005).
 
 In the new sequence of American galleries, the first two will be devoted to the Hood’s very substantial collection of Native American art, which has never before had a permanent dedicated space in the museum.  The age of the holdings stems from the college’s original charter, which committed to the education of young Native Americans.  The museum has recommitted to that mission with a deliberate expansion of the collection in recent years. Organized with input from Dartmouth’s Native American Studies faculty,  and by consulting curator Rayna Green (Curator Emerita from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History), the two galleries will be devoted, respectively, to major works by contemporary Native Americans and to traditional art, explored in the contexts of Native strategies for adaptation, ecology, and survival. 
 
The following two galleries will address art from colonial times to the early twentieth century.   Early works will be explored in the context of their New England history and the college’s past; and nineteenth-century objects will be considered through the lens of the democratization of American art in the production of decorative arts, daguerreotypes, folk art, and narrative paintings, sculpture, and prints.  The last two galleries will focus on the manifestations of American participation in international modernism, and post-1945 works in presented a global context.  Throughout, the galleries will demonstrate the efforts of the museum’s staff to diversify the Hood’s holdings, and to allow particularly complex cultural narratives to take the stage.  Although the majority of object labels will be written by in-house and guest curators, selected faculty members from a range of academic departments will contribute labels for objects particularly relevant to teaching in their fields.
 
Proposed grant funds would support all aspects of the installation: gallery lighting, cases and pedestals; photography frames; labels; conservation costs; and contract art handlers.  The grant additionally would support a one-year curatorial assistant position to facilitate all aspects of the installation project, and to research and organize future installations and exhibitions drawn from the museum’s American holdings.
 
Recommendation:  That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $280,000 to the Hood Museum of Art to install new galleries of Native American and American art.
Approved by the Board:  November 2, 2017