Since it opened in 1985, the Hood Museum of Art has had a kind of prototypical leader — ambitious 30-something curators or deputies at larger museums.
The Hood, a growing museum on an Ivy League campus, was a brief stop of three to five years for most of its directors, some of whom went on to lead some of the country’s biggest art museums.
That pattern changed not long after the Hood turned 30. John Stomberg didn’t see the Hood as just a way station.
“I was looking for a long run,” Stomberg said in an interview in the museum’s third floor offices. “It takes you four or five years to do anything.”
Hired in 2016, Stomberg oversaw the Hood’s $50 million expansion and renovation. But more importantly, he led a rethinking of how a museum should operate, how it can welcome the public and how a museum leader reaches out beyond the institution’s walls. When he retires in June, it will be as the museum’s longest-serving director, and perhaps its most consequential one.
“It’s a significantly improved institution from the one that John came to in 2016,” Dan Bernstein, who was chairman of the Hood’s board of advisors when Stomberg was hired, said in a phone interview.
Where museums, including the Hood, were once heavy with authority and solemnity, the Hood’s galleries are now more open and inviting, and there’s a wider variety of art on display from all over the world. Exposure is the aim. The Hood has always been free and open to the public, and under Stomberg it has made itself freer and more open, more welcoming.
“What we’re trying to change is that people feel comfortable coming in and feel comfortable with ambiguity,” Stomberg said.
‘Art history applied’
Stomberg has spent his entire career in academic museums, which by itself is a little unusual among art historians and curators.
He grew up in Newton, Mass., and went to one of the city’s public high schools before studying art history at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., then earning master’s and doctorate degrees at Boston University.
He planned to study a subject in German modern art for his dissertation, but his wife, Beth, was pregnant with the first of their two daughters. Traveling to Germany for research wasn’t feasible, so he wrote his dissertation on the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Her archive is at Syracuse University, so he could balance research trips with life as a stay-at-home dad.
Conducting research told him that he didn’t want a career teaching art history, and at BU a love for academic museums set in. He thought he’d work at BU’s art gallery and head from there to a municipal art museum.
But the curatorial work he was doing hooked him. He liked that he had to look after every aspect of an exhibition, from insurance and logistics to writing labels for display. And he liked the educational component.
“It was art history applied,” he said.
He got a job at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., which unlike BU has a museum that builds its own collections. (At BU, it’s easier just to buy memberships for art students to the nearby Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Stomberg said.)
The Williams College Museum of Art has a lot in common with the Hood. It opened a major expansion in 1986 designed by architect Charles Moore, who also designed the Hood. Both museums focus on the use of their collections for education. Stomberg was there for about a decade, eventually serving as deputy director and chief curator.
He was hired to lead the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, which had half the staff and budget that Williams had, but a larger collection. A plan to expand the museum wasn’t materializing, and after nearly five years there, the Hood directorship opened up. (The Mount Holyoke museum is due to complete an expansion and renovation this fall.)
Leading the Hood was a dream job for Stomberg, who was 56 when he came to Hanover. “Frankly, I had always wanted to work at the Hood, but the timing didn’t work,” he said.
The Hood offers a director some resources and scope for acquisitions and exhibitions, but is small enough to require some involvement in day-to-day work. Stomberg is effectively chief curator and signs off on exhibitions.
“I’m not so far from the action that I can’t have an impact,” he said.
But he is not interested in being the straw that stirs the drink. Museum directors can become, or be seen, as impresarios if they’re not careful, and Stomberg prefers to do his work without flash.
Laying the groundwork
Every director has left a mark on the Hood. Richard Teitz, served while the museum was being designed and built, from 1981 to March 1984, and articulated the need for the museum: No one would donate art to Dartmouth if there wasn’t a place to exhibit it.
“Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity was in Nelson Rockefeller, who owned one of the finest collections of contemporary art,” Teitz told the Valley News in 1981. “He was one of Dartmouth’s very loyal alumni, but donated nearly nothing to the college because he knew if he made a major contribution, it wouldn’t see the light of day.”
At the time, Dartmouth held around 35,000 objects in its collections.
Jacquelynn Baas was named interim director when Teitz left, and was named director a year later. Teitz was 39 when he started; Baas was 37. She served for a little over three years before leaving to run the museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and oversaw the opening of the Hood, and expanded its endowment.
Her successor, James Cuno, started in 1989 and left in 1991 to lead Harvard University’s art museums. He eventually led both the Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s wealthiest art institution, in Los Angeles.
He had the distinction of hiring Katherine Hart, the first curator of academic programming at an American university museum, in 1990. Hart worked at the Hood for 30 years, as senior curator of collections, assistant director and twice as interim director.
Until now, Timothy Rub had had the longest tenure as director, from 1991 to 1999. He expanded the museum’s reach by inviting local school groups, work the Hood continues to do. And he built the endowment substantially, Hart said. Rub eventually became director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Derrick Cartwright led the Hood for three years after Rub and planned the museum’s 20th anniversary events. Both Rub and Cartwright were in their 30s when they took the Hood job.
Brian Kennedy was 44, and had been in museum leadership since his 20s, first as assistant director of the National Gallery of Ireland, then as the director of the National Gallery of Australia. He directed the Hood from 2005 to 2010 and helped lay the groundwork for the expansion project with a thorough planning process.
“We’ve grown out of our teenage years,” Kennedy told the Valley News in 2005. Now, “what sort of a museum do you want to be?” Kennedy opened the museum to a wider range of art, including major exhibitions by Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui, and of paintings by Australian aboriginal artists.
Kennedy left in 2010 to lead the Toledo Museum of Art. Michael Taylor, who’d been a curator at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, started in 2011, and served until 2015, when he left under circumstances neither he nor the college explained publicly.
Juliette Bianco served as interim leader until Stomberg started, and she, Hart and others kept the building project moving forward.
Dartmouth announced last October Stomberg’s plan to retire this June and named a committee that is searching for his replacement. A finalist is likely to emerge by May, Stomberg said.
Expanded horizons
When Stomberg started, he had to complete the fundraising for the expansion, which entailed a lot of travel to talk to potential donors.
“The fundraising was not complete,” Bernstein, of the board of advisors, said. “The last mile of fundraising is often the hardest.”
And he also had to figure out what to do while the museum was closed for nearly three years and how it would display its collections when it reopened.
It was Stomberg who came up with the idea for the Hood Downtown. The museum leased the former Amidon Jewelers space on Main Street and arranged a slate of shows by international contemporary artists.
Hood Downtown kept the museum in the public eye and exposed the college and region to artists they likely wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
At the same time, he kept the building project on track and within its $50 million budget, something that can’t always be said at major projects at Dartmouth.
“This one was extremely well-managed,” Bernstein said.
While the Hood was closed, Stomberg and the museum’s staff took the opportunity to decide how they wanted to display art. For decades, American and European art sat at the center of the museum. Stomberg and his fellow curators opted to make space there for art from other cultures and traditions. The American and European work is still there, but at the museum’s edges. Rather than tell the same stories, the Hood’s staff asked, “What’s missing from the art history we’ve already learned?”
“For him, I think the lasting impact on the Hood and American art is that Native American art is part of the canon,” Jami Powell, whom Stomberg hired as curator of Native American art and is now curator of indigenous art, said in an interview.
The Hood’s acquisitions have followed suit. Though Stomberg has overseen acquisitions of work by major American and European artists to fill in holes in the museum’s collections — including by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, and Elisabeth Vigee LeBrun, a French painter of the Old Master era — he and the other curators have acquired much more from disparate traditions.
The Hood’s collections now include more than 73,000 objects, Stomberg said. It also has an endowment of around $110 million, about $40 million of which is set aside for acquisitions.
Highlights from the museum’s 2025 acquisitions include work by artists from Japan, Senegal, Puerto Rico and the Native American Hopi-Tewa culture. Dartmouth is a global institution, and its museum increasingly reflects that reality.
The Hood has “a commitment to trying to acquire works from artists around the world with varying backgrounds who reflect the range of students at Dartmouth,” Stomberg said.
Overcoming barriers
When it reopened, in January 2019, the Hood was poised both to welcome more visitors and to expand its own operation.
The original museum had been built to accommodate a staff of 10, but by the time the expansion began, there were 27 employees, Stomberg said. It now has around 50, and Stomberg has earned a reputation for giving curators and employees the right mixture of support and autonomy.
“There are so many things about John that are unique,” Powell said. He’s a strong mentor, but also, “he is just a real human. You can go in and have a conversation with him about art, but also you can have a conversation with him about your kids, or your dog.” A Hood employee can bring their “whole self” to work, she said.
Visitorship in 2019 set a record, with more than 57,000 people crossing the threshold, attributable to the new building and the big shows that heralded its opening. The coronavirus pandemic closed the museum a little over a year later, stalling that momentum. The Hood pivoted to online programming and concentrated on digitizing the museum’s collections. Around 65% of the collection is viewable online.
Only in the past year have visitor numbers rebounded, with nearly 32,000 people going to the Hood. To put that in context, nearly 35,000 people went to the Hood Downtown in 2018.
This gets to Stomberg’s most important mission. The Hood is more visible and more welcoming than ever, but there are still perceived barriers to viewing art, and to coming onto campus to do so.
Dartmouth’s arts district is the most open part of campus, with the exception of the college’s baseball stadium, a great, and free place to see a ballgame. The perception of art as high-falutin’ and hard to understand, even gratuitously so, is a museum’s great burden. How does the Hood make itself as accessible as the national pastime while also maintaining its scholarship?
“We do have like eight PhDs on the staff,” Stomberg said. “But one of the things we accept is that everyone brings their own experience to each work.”
The Hood’s brief write-ups that accompany each work are more open-ended than they once were, with the understanding that the viewer’s search for meaning is their own.
“We try to validate that,” Stomberg said.
Stomberg is retiring to the Berkshires, not far from Williamstown. He had once thought he would return to scholarship, but instead, he plans to paint. He has been experimenting with colorful, abstract work and hopes to dig deeper. Lebanon’s AVA Gallery and Art Center, where Stomberg has curated shows and for which he wrote an introduction to a history of its first 50 years, will show Stomberg’s work in June.
He and Kathy Hart are scheduled to hold a conversation about art, curation and museums at 5:30 on May 22 at AVA.
Stomberg’s outreach to places like AVA sets an example, said Bente Torjusen, who served as executive director of AVA for 30 years.
“It puts him in a class of his own,” she said.
John Stomberg will give a public lecture titled “How Did We Get Here? Thoughts on American Painting in the United States” at 5 p.m. on April 16 at the Hood Museum of Art.
