05 July 2025

New Hampshire's Hood Museum of Art

Eve Kahn wrote that Dartmouth College in Hanover N.H  gathered much of its experimental architecture along the edges of its cam­p­us, which was otherwise dominated by Georgian and colon­ial quadrang­les in brick and white clapboard. At the SE corner, a few imagin­ative buildings dedicated to the arts are hud­dled together. The best so far is the Hood Museum of Art, which was originally de­sig­n­ed in the 1980s by the influential post-modernist Charles Moore. Its gabled brick pavilions are crowned in a domed finial with a necklace of raised copper triang­les. Moore laid out a meandering path from the campus’ main green, meant to pique curios­ity. He flanked a gateway with layers of square columns, which all­owed glimpses of courtyards and galleries beyond. But the signage was poor, and the gateway’s brick, con­crete and copper surfaces aged poorly in winter.

Hood Museum of Art, 
Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire

Hood director, John Stomberg, says that for many students and visitors, Moore’s scheme was too obtuse. Stomberg supervised a $50 million renov­ation and expansion by the Manhattan firm Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects (of Barnes Collection in Philadelphia fame) that added badly needed classrooms, gal­leries and an atrium. The ever-growing permanent collect­ion (c65,000 pieces) spans from Assyrian palace reliefs to C19th Native American battle­field sket­ches, Papua New Guinea head­dresses, and a 2018 painting by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu.

Each year, thousands of schoolchildren visit the gal­leries. There’s no entry fee, and few rival institutions nearby. Dartmouth und­er­grad­uates have to take some art classes, and have to visit a museum.

We pass the New Guinea wooden drums, masks and shields in poly­chrome swirling patterns, and through a forest of cross-hatched poles car­v­ed by Aboriginal Australians. A teacher and her class choose an elab­orately coiffed Af­rican mask to sketch. A 2016 teepee-shaped sculpture was made by Choctaw-Cherokee Jeffrey Gibson, topped with a birdlike cer­am­ic head and draped in bells.

Side galleries have more predictable works: Calder’s mobile, Rot­hko’s abstraction, Picasso’s Guitar on a Table (1912). In Perug­ino’s C16th tableau Virgin and Child with Saints, men gaze up at Mary and her infant on a pedestal; the paint­ing is studied in various Renaissance classes. Under-appreciated masters from the 19th and early C20ths were also displayed.

There are calm waterfront scenes by the African-American painters Robert Seldon Duncan­son and Henry Ossawa Tanner, and luminous por­traits of women by Cecilia Beaux and Lilly Martin Spencer. A grey-green stoneware jar was made in South Carolina c1830 by enslaved potter David Drake. Snakes sprout from the forehead and ribs of Harriet Hosmer’s 1850s marble bust of Medusa, near Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s C19th painting of an ancient Roman sculpture gallery.

Dartmouth School opened in 1769. soon starting collections eg fragments of mastodon tusks excavated in Kentucky and a ruffle-edged silver bowl made in Boston. Over the centuries, museum displays were installed at var­ious buildings, incl at neigh­bouring Wilson Hall, a 1880s turreted Romanesque former library. The Hood’s construction in the 1980s was financed by rich al­umnus Harvey Hood.

The Hood site is sloped and narrow, tucked between Wilson Hall and a 1960s theatre building, Hopkins Centre for the Arts, designed by modernist Wallace Harrison. The Hop has concrete archways and cantilevers. Moore described his contribution to the campus as unobtrusive, in reaction to modernists’ macho construct­ions.

The Hood attracted many gifts e.g New Guinea woodcarvings from L.A collector-dealer Harry Frank­lin and Native Amer­ic­an drawings from art historian Mark Lansburgh. But there was lim­it­ed room to show them. Classroom space was cramp­ed as faculty incor­p­orated art into the curricula and there was little flexible in­door space for events.

Stomberg arrived in 2016 from Mount Holy­oke College Art Museum, when construction plans and fundraising were underway. Charles Moore’s defenders were protesting against TWBTA’s partial eras­ure of the original building and gateway. TWBTA has pointed out that the firm has the greatest respect for Moore’s oeuvre – Tsien had been one of his architecture students in the 1970s.

Much of the 1980s brick skin has been preserved, along with the signature domed finial. The galleries and staircases still have Moore’s expanses of raw concrete and quirky ziggurat forms sculpted on the column capitals and light fixtures. A variety of dark and pale oak floorboards adds a sense of patina to the redone galler­ies. Sunlight streams in through skylights, staircase windows and the bay, which keeps visitors oriented as they roam through disp­lays that explore continents and millennia.

Reactions to the renovations have been fav­ourable, albeit with some traces of nostalgia. The lofty atrium, lined in the same brick, is already serving as a major campus attraction for stud­ents. Live saxophone music wafts upstairs. Stomberg says he is hop­ing to schedule some dance performances in the window, which has a sweeping view of the Georgian and Colonial campus.

Thank you Apollo for the history and the photos.

African Art
architecturalrecord.com

Modern American Art
Artforum

Assyrian Reliefs and ancient Greek pottery
artscope

An art critic, who visited the Hood since it re-opened in Jan 2019 after nearly three years and $50  million renovations, wrote this response: Clearly the old gallery was too dark, too small and poorly equipped for students and outside visitors. The gallery literature says the space of the old Hood was greatly expanded, and there are now 16 galleries instead of 10. Even more importantly the galleries are now beautifully light-fitted. And the Hood is much better connected to the university campus.

But the contents on display and the flow of visitors are less satisfactory. The new director clearly wanted to map and display the entire world of art his­tory, within one gallery! When I go to a gallery it is to see what they special­ise in eg Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, or Rus­sian decorative arts during the Czarist reigns. I can broaden my horizons in art history, but I don’t want to be involuntarily moved from one era to other eras within a single room, from cont­in­ent to continent without a cup of coffee in between. I agree with Murray Whyte: “In one of the mus­eum’s few unavoid­able paths, you have to pass through a coll­ect­ion of contemporary Native American art to reach the Hood’s trad­it­ional American collection”. It was confusing.





6 comments:

Ирина Полещенко said...

I like visiting art museums. There is a local history museum in our city.

HOOD MUSEUM OF ART TURNING 40 said...

In Sept 2025, the Hood Museum of Art will commemorate its 40th anniversary with landmark exhibitions and innovative programs that support a visionary future for art at Dartmouth and among the communities of the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire and Vermont. Dartmouth's collections are among the oldest and largest of any college/university in the country, but it was not until 1985 that they were all housed under one roof and made available to faculty, students, and the public.


hels said...

Irina
Me too. We are normally used to visiting major history and art museums in capital cities, but how wonderful when smaller or less famous cities open great facilities.

hels said...

Hood Museum
I am very impressed with the idea of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Museum. I would love to be there this Sept!
It will also be important to house all the collections in one stunning building. I have only seen one part of the Hood Museum a LONG time ago.

Deb said...

Until late September a Hood exhibition is highlighting two landscape paintings by Claude Monet, the famous late 19th century French painter. Through quick strokes of brightly coloured paint, Monet prompted his audiences to take a new look at the French landscape.
Helen, is this a coincidence? French Impressionism is a major Winter Exhibition from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, in partnership with the National Gallery Vic. The exhibition charts the trajectory of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in late 19th-century France, highlighting the renowned avant-garde artists at the centre of this period of radical experimentation.

Parnassus said...

Hello Hels, I am glad that Dartmouth has a large museum to house its impressive collection, but I am not a big fan of the Hood's architecture. I tried to look up photos showing its architectural progression as you describe, but I could not easily find anything.

I know it is a problem on crowded college campuses where to put large new buildings, but the Hood crowds Dartmouth's historical and iconic Wilson Hall, and the heavy contrast does not favor either building. People like to use words like "contrast" and "juxtaposition" but basically they are trying to excuse the fact that an ugly and expensive building has been erected, usually despite protests.

As a building I find the Hood rather ugly and pedestrian--I am sure that I have seen many similar structures, perhaps other museums, shopping malls, and the like. Wilson Hall, on the other hand, is an attractive building with a high standard of craftsmanship--I have sometimes been able to identify Dartmouth photographs because they include snippets of Wilson Hall.

So while I would love to visit the Hood and see the Dartmouth collection, from the exterior it seems awkwardly placed and designed.
--Jim