You Can Feel Good about the New Hood Art Museum

 

It was quite a coup for Dartmouth College's Hood Art Museum to secure John Stomberg as its new director. Stomberg came from Mount Holyoke by way of Williams College. At each of those institutions he established a reputation for doing amazing things with relatively small collections. He knows rhat it's not the number of items that you have on display, it's what you do with them and what you can borrow.

Stomberg signed aboard to help the Hood reimagine itself physically as well as interpretively. It has just reopened after being closed for three years and a $50 million rebuild. If you've been to the old Hood, you'll hardly recognize the new museum with its 16 new galleries that add 16,000 square feet of display space. The museum flows organically into an airy atrium, the college theater, and a cafeteria.

One indication of where the new Hood is headed is that it did not reopen with a splashy special exhibit. It has long been a teaching museum whose educational mission takes priority over public outreach, and over the next several years will focus upon items from its permanent collection. What has changed, though, is pedagogy. What do we see in art? What values are embedded within a sculpture, painting, or object? What audiences are being served? And, in the age of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and multiculturalism, which stories should be told in a deeper way?

Fortunately, the Hood has treasures to help navigate these new demands. The core of most college art museums is dominated by donations from alums and philanthropists. This can be a crapshoot, but luckily Dartmouth has lots of Native American, Aboriginal, and African art that gives a head start to its goal of inclusiveness. (It owns about 65,000 pieces over all.) The possession of non-Western art no matter how legitimately acquired inevitably raises questions about colonialism. The Hood's approach is to admit this is a factor and use objects to explore questions about imperialism, acquisition, and interpretation. There is, for example, an entire wall filled with African masks. Instead of arranging them by region, we see at a glance the wondrous diversity within a continent too often stereotyped as if it were one big nation rather than the repository of unique traditions and cultures. We also see one of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's large scale curtains made of cast-off bottle bands. Point made: past creativity meets contemporary vision. We later see attitudes towards globalization in a mashup painting by Congo's Eddie Kamuanga that is where classics meet kitsch and commercialism.

The Native American material is also poignant. Cowboy and Indian motifs stand alone, but also in association with each other and in juxtaposition to contemporary Native art. It makes many of the points as the African masks about diversity and internal creative traditions. Many of the syncretic pieces are shot through with wry humor and/or activist politics. A simple red bar, for instance, has "Red Man" at one end of its scale and 1/16 blood on the other. It stands within a stairwell and requires minimal commentary to make the point about how cavalierly race is measured and imagined. Another shows a cowboy, his gun drawn but his torso and head riddled with bullets we preseume did not come from another cowboy!

If you've still not gotten the point, Aboriginal material to drive you home. Very little of it is traditional; it consists mostly of recent works that draw inspiration from older styles. It is at once ancient, but new– a marriage of past and present that makes Aboriginal culture a living phenomenon, not a fly-in-amber moment in time.

You have to hunt for the European and American art, something for which Stomberg has taken some heat. I see both ends of that can of worms. I admire attempts to bring interpretation in line with current sensibilities, yet it is objectively true that the Hood's first show shortchanges Western Art and the work of curators. It is also occasionally open to criticism of being both overly politically correct, yet conservative.

The key is what the next Hood show looks like. Will it display more conventional pieces? I'm happy to give a pass this time around, because even with 16 additional galleries you can't display everything. The choice is basically the rock and pond scenario: does one go for maximum splash–a themed display–or skim the surface with small drips of everything? I prefer the first approach, but it will be interesting to see if the Hood leaves itself open to charges of catering to what is acceptable in the moment.

Art and conformity usually don't keep good company with each other. Sometimes shock and anger makes a point. A short corridor of photographs raised a few red flags. One panel consisted of an explanation of why a particular image was not on display. The skinny: it would make too many people uncomfortable. There's another explanation: censorship. What a museum collects is or isn't art; if curators think it's not, sell it. Don't tell me what you can't show me. Photographs are also used as the centerpiece of a debate over who owns the content of the art. Is that even a question? It is the artist, surely, and the public decides either to look or look away. In the case of a photograph, the answer is cut-and-dried; if what the photographer snaps is on public display, the photographer owns the image.

I hope that the museum doesn't opt for comfort and will concentrate on teaching the controversy. A walk across the street to the Baker Library makes a good case for teaching controversy. The basement contains the spectacular José Clemente Orozco mural The Epic of American Civilization. Visitors often think they are going to see a Diego Rivera mural. That's understandable as Orozco's themes echo those in Rivera's famous mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Both artists juxtapose savagery, progress, and regress, just as both use life cycle imagery, skewer religious hypocrisy, and expose social class power structures. Both also painted during the Great Depression and both were accused of being leftwing propagandists. (Some of Rivera's works were painted over!) My point is that just because a work disturbs is not a cause for censorship. It boggles my mind that today's self-styled progressives call for the removal of all things objectionable. Do they not know that it has been the political right that has historically censored art? Some thought Orozco's mural was incongruent with Dartmouth's mission and wanted it removed. As you view it today, ponder what would have been lost had the fashion/passion of the moment prevailed.