One of the first Hood exhibitions I wrote about was “Fred Wilson: So Much Trouble in the World — Believe It or Not!” at the end of 2005. Wilson, a conceptual artist and curator, was given free rein to assemble the objects in the Hood’s collections in juxtapositions that encouraged people to view them in a new way.
It was a memorable show, and Wilson was a memorable interview. He was lighthearted and funny, but serious. The column was headlined “At Play in the Hood’s Collection,” but Wilson was playing for keeps, highlighting the many ways in which museums, including the Hood, have marginalized people who were outside the mold of the moneyed, white, dominant class. In true American fashion, he saw an opportunity.
“You don’t really know what people are taking in,” Wilson said as we looked at the still-unfinished installation. “That’s part of the beauty of an art museum.”
The Hood has mounted dozens of shows since then, but there’s a direct line from Wilson to “This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World,” the museum’s sizable new show of its holdings in American art. The openness that characterized Wilson’s show, the sense of play and of serious intent, are there on a huge scale.
“This Land” marks the first time the Hood has exhibited the Euro-centric work of the 19th- and 20th-century painters who created what came to be known as “American” art, alongside the works of Native American artists and other artists from the multitude of backgrounds that the nation comprises. The result is an exhibition of more than 160 works that illuminates a wide range of American perspectives. If you want an idea of what it means to be American in the 21st century, see this show.
What makes “This Land” so compelling is its emphasis not on any overarching idea of the American experience, but on individual points of view. The show’s curators did their best to get out of the way, to allow the art to speak more directly to viewers.
“We are kind of drawing on the creative generosity of the artists,” Jami Powell, one of the four Hood curators who assembled the show, said in an interview over Zoom. The curators collaborated to write wall text that’s open ended, including some passages that end with earnest questions rather than squared off assertions.
The art on view in “This Land” ranges from the familiar, such as the massive New Hampshire (White Mountain Landscape), the circa 1864 painting by Regis Francois Gignoux that’s been on view at the Hood for years, to contemporary works designed to challenge the romantic view of the nation’s history.
For example, Oil Boom, Cara Romero’s 2015 pigment print, which places the underwater form of a traditional Native American dancer under a landscape of oil wells, as if the dancer is suspended in the soil and is the substance the pumps are extracting.
Some of the work reads as merely personal, yet deeply felt. The Hood commissioned Jamie Okuma, whose background is from the Native American Luiseño and Shoshone Bannock people and Japanese American, to make a pair of beaded boots. Titled Peep, they were inspired by a California scrub jay that Okuma’s family adopted. The glass beads seem impossibly tiny to work by hand, and the composition is dazzling to look at.
Elsewhere, the curators have placed objects in conversation with one another. An Audubon drawing from the early 1800s of a bird of prey hangs next to Condemned, a 2006 print by Walton Ford that depicts a colorful bird under the words, “I wish that you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it.” That line is attributed to the early-20th-century American serial killer Charles Panzram. Whatever else John James Audubon achieved, he killed a lot of birds.
In front of those two images is a water jar from around 1900 that bears an image of a bird — birds were thought to bring rain with them. If Audubon’s work is colonial and Ford’s is anti-colonial, the water jar appeals not to human eyes but to nature itself. The wall text attributes the clay jar to the most prolific artist in the exhibition, whom the curators identify as “Artist Once Known.” It is as graceful a way of saying that someone once knew the person who made this as I could imagine, far more graceful than the common “Artist Unknown.” It says, in effect, that not only the artist but the people who knew the artist have been erased.
Over the past decade or more, the Hood has made a point of putting out catalogs for most of its shows, but there’s no catalog available for “This Land.” That’s by design.
In April, the museum plans to host a convention to discuss how the show, and others like it, was assembled. Those conversations will inform a book based on the exhibition.
“Museums throughout the country are trying to figure out how to tell more complete and true stories about American history,” Powell said.
The Terra Foundation for American Art provided $2.5 million in grants to facilitate the efforts of 35 organizations, including the Hood, to re-examine their permanent collections.
What the Hood has discovered, and has committed to exploring, is that among the familiar landscapes are countless perspectives we know little about, and should understand if we’re to know our country in all its fullness. What you make of that opportunity is up to you.
The Hood Museum of Art is open Wednesdays through Saturdays. Admission is free. Go to hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu for more information.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
