HANOVER — The Hood Museum of Art’s curators started thinking about the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2022. It was, objectively, a strange time to be an American.
The COVID pandemic was still with us, inflation was at a 40-year high, and a long replay of the bitter 2020 presidential election was just beginning. Even the idea of what makes an American seemed up for grabs. Still does, really.
The Hood’s curators opted to look ahead. A big anniversary is an opportunity to see with fresh eyes, if possible.
“That’s an interesting moment,” John Stomberg, the Hood’s director, said in an interview at the museum this week. Curators could look at works in the museum’s collection with an eye toward those that would foster conversation about America and how artists have seen it.
Drawing only on its own holdings, the museum is mounting a dozen exhibitions that reflect on aspects of the American story and American art. The bulk of those shows is on view now, and most will stay up for much of the year.
Stomberg and Jami Powell, the Hood’s associate director of curatorial affairs and curator of Indigenous art, said the museum’s curatorial staff opted to assemble a series of smaller shows, rather than a single sprawling one.
They started, Powell said, by “asking everyone to put together a list of 10 to 15 must-have objects.” Over the course of curating the shows, around a dozen people provided input.
“It was very much a collaborative process from the beginning,” said Powell, who was first hired as the Hood’s curator of Native American art in 2018.
For the past two decades, the Hood has been engaged in examining and building its collection to include art and artists left out of the canon of art history. The 250th anniversary exhibitions reflect that effort.
In “Art Histories/Art Futures,” the entry point for the American anniversary shows, Stomberg and Powell pointed to two works in dialog. One, May Stevens’ 1968 painting “Big Daddy Paper Doll,” a doughy man sits unclothed in the center of the frame and around him are cutouts of uniforms he could wear, as executioner, soldier, police officer and butcher. It’s a darkly comic view from a violent era in American history.
Next to the painting is a modestly sized sculpture of a soldier carrying a wounded comrade. The Hood acquired Michael Naranjo’s “He’s my brother” in 2022 in honor of former Dartmouth President James Wright, who died that October. Wright was a Marine. Where Stevens was poking holes in the paper-thin nature of authority, Naranjo, who lost his eyesight and the use of his right hand in Vietnam, expresses the grave weight of experience.
Other exhibitions in the series offer their own juxtapositions. Frank Stella’s shaped canvas, “Chocorua IV,” with its dramatic offset triangle, seems less radical next to pottery made by the Hopi-Tewa artist Nampeyo.
Those two works are part of a show titled “Always Already: Abstraction in the United States,” which demonstrates that abstract forms have long been a part of American art.
“American Pop” features one of the Hood’s treasures, Ed Ruscha’s “Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas,” painted in 1963. It’s easy to read it as a celebration of American mobility and energy, but it’s also a strangely empty painting, with a wedge of dark sky pressing down on the gas station of the title. And the “Standard” is a sign of something stamped and repeated.
On an adjacent wall is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s 2002 painting “The Rancher,” which takes a similar approach to commercial signage, but this time with a person, a Native American figure, in the background, rendered faint by smears of overpainting, as if seen through a grubby shop window.
Other exhibitions take on the mythos of the American Revolution, and the long legacy of slavery in America. A show opening Feb. 7 examines how artists have helped imagine the nation and bring it into being.
The Hood also examines how its own collection has been assembled, and how it reflects the nation. “From Mastodon to Mosaic” starts with a Mastodon molar, unearthed in Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in the 1770s, when Dartmouth and the nation were both babies. Mastodons and mammoths roamed North America in the Pleistocene Epoch, which goes back a couple million years beyond 250.
With so many shows, and such a wide range of material on display, the Hood’s curators wanted to, as Powell put it, “let the art do the work.” As much as the labels next to the art explain, they also are meant to open conversations.
“We really want to invite our audience into a dialog with the works,” Powell said. Museum-goers bring their own ideas and experiences. “What we don’t want to do,” she added, “is to tell people what to think.”
As much as America and its discontents are front and center right now, the Hood is offering ways to see the country from new angles.
“We often say that the Hood Museum is a laboratory, and we try things out,” Stomberg said. The staff “put up a show and then learn from it, rather than learn everything and then put on a show.”
That sounds a bit like America itself, an ongoing experiment. Let’s not blow it up.
The Hood Museum of Art’s exploration of America’s 250th anniversary continues through 2026, with some shows running into 2027. Admission to the museum is free and its winter hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, go to hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu.
Help for Gary Hamel
Starting at 6 p.m. this Friday, Enfield Shaker Museum is hosting a reception and pop-up art sale for Gary Hamel, who lost his home and many of his possessions to a fire earlier this month. Hamel is as close to a lifelong Upper Valley artist as there is, and I don’t think it’s going too far to note that he lives pretty close to the bone.
I wrote about a show of his work at the Main Street Museum last summer and got to sit with Gary in his studio in Canaan, a tiny hutch of a place, insulated with his troves of materials, from paint and canvas to boxes of found and thrifted photographs. On Friday evening there will be light refreshments and cocktails and Hamel’s work for sale. He is a true Yankee original, and his work is, too.
Still life photography
A pair of exhibitions — “Passing On,” by Kay McCabe, and “Beyond the Unknown,” by Li Shen — explore photographic still life in Kimball Union Academy’s Taylor Gallery. An opening reception is planned for 5:30 to 7 Friday evening and the show is on view through February. For more information, go to kua.org/arts/the-taylor-gallery.