Art Road Trip: What’s Good at the Hood?

 

Hood Art Museum

Hanover, New Hampshire

May 2023

[Click on photos for large view]

 

 

 

We made a return trip to the Hook Art Museum because it has an exhibit of Margaret Bourke-White photos. Bourke-White (1904-71) is an iconic name in photography and deservedly so. She was sometimes critiqued for posing her subjects–allegedly a no-no during the 1930s-40s among those who insisted that all documentary work should capture images exactly as the lens saw them. Courtesy of Susan Sontag and others, we now assume that the camera “lies” no matter whether an image is spontaneous or posed. After all, the moment shutterbugs point the camera left instead of right, they have “edited.” 

 

 

Bourke-White was a proto third-wave feminist in that she led an army of other women photographers who kicked out the jams of what was expected of female artists. She even had the first cover of Life Magazine, which is also the source of the Hood exhibit of shots she took during World War II. Alas, there are two problems with the exhibit. First, it’s quite small and we could have used a lot more images to showcase her considerable talents. A much bigger issue, though, is one that’s endemic in museums: inappropriate lighting. Displaying photographs, especially those in black and white, requires close attention to the type of illumination used and the placement of images. The Bourke-Whites were hung in a straight line along a corridor that’s dark at one end and flooded with light from a window at the other. The most enduring impression is that the bounce of harsh lights upon the glass rendered many of Bourke-White’s prints hard to appreciate. She was known for her eye for composition and that’s still evident. What’s not so easy to see is her command of tonal range. I was only able to snap three okay(ish) images and even they have a brown cast that’s not in the original. Oh well. You can always use Google Images to see what these shots don’t convey.

 

 

 

What’s good about the Hood is that it’s a true teaching museum, so there’s always something interesting to see. We concentrated on Latino and Indigenous political art, which took up most of the top floor. It pretty much details grievances and identity issues from the political awakening of the 1970s to the present with visits to the past. Many of you have probably seen well-traveled works such as Yolanda Lopez’s Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? or Jesus Barraza’s Indian Land.

 

 

The 1970s were a period in which the United Farm Workers Union led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez was at its height. In 1973, the UFW launched a strike against Gallo wines and a boycott of table grapes. The Hood displays a poster of the strike from an unknown artist and an Incan-meets-psychedelia boycott image from Xavier Viramontes. Raisins, of course, are sun-ripened grapes. They too came in for scrutiny as we see in Ester Hernandez’s advertising caricature Sun Raid. 

 

 

 

 

Menchaca

 

The 1980s saw a backlash against the farmworkers, but as Michael Menchaca’s work from 1985 shows, political consciousness remained high. It has remained so. Note Rupert Garcia’s Obama From Douglass that shows an unbroken link from Frederick Douglass to America’s first black president. A wall of posters of activists  from Joe Hill to the present shows the major strength of left movements: a long historical memory.  

 

 

 

 

Latinos have their own “Say their names” memory aids and have taken small steps toward LGBTQ concerns. Keith Monkman’s study for Lit Skin in a Limo is at once whimsical and defiant. 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not sure how much longer any of this will be on display. You might not like some of the more contemporary pieces, but I can say with confidence that a trip to the Hood will make you think. If you’re lucky, some of the museum’s superb collection of Australian aboriginal art will be on display.

 

Rob Weir