Displaying items by tag: Hood Museum of Art

It was a very good year for the Hood Museum of Art. In 2014, the Dartmouth College institution received two major donations of artwork from alums. The college was already an art lovers' destination, offering such attractions as the stunning "The Epic of American Civilization" mural by José Clemente Orozco in the Baker Library. Exhibits included the likes of Picasso prints, aboriginal paintings, and the recently closed "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties." The gifts of contemporary photography from Nancy and Tom O'Neil (class of '79) and of European and American art from the late Barbara J. and David G. Stahl (class of '47) add nearly 160 pieces to the Hood's permanent collection.

It's not every day — or year — that a college art museum can boast such acquisitions.

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth received an anonymous $10 million donation. The gift, which will be put towards building the centerpiece of the two-year renovation and expansion project:  a new Museum Learning Center.

The renovation project, helmed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects—designers of the American Folk Art Museum building and the new Barnes Foundation—is part of Dartmouth’s aim of beefing up its campus arts district. The expansion will increase the museum’s current 39,000-square-foot space by 15,000 square feet, giving it more room to show off the museum’s collection, which touts some 65,000 objects including paintings by Perugino, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rockwell Kent, along with a collection of Assyrian stone reliefs. The expansion will also add three classrooms for the use of digital technology.

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has on view through November 28, 2010, eight superb American paintings from the collection of a Dartmouth parent. Installed alongside highlights from the museum’s American art collections, these loans illuminate dramatic artistic and cultural changes that took place in America between the mid-1830s through World War I, tracing, for example, evolving attitudes toward nature, nation, and the growth of the city. Such rich cultural associations make these works ideal for interdisciplinary study by the Dartmouth community and the museum’s broader audiences.

Hudson River School Landscapes
Although the Hood boasts impressive holdings of portraits honoring Dartmouth luminaries and landscapes depicting New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the museum has no major works by the most prominent painters associated with the Hudson River School. Four of the loans are celebrated paintings by Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)—artists who span the chronological and stylistic range of this romantic landscape tradition.1