By GLYNIS HART
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HANOVER – After being closed for three years for renovations, the Hood Museum on the Dartmouth College campus is now open to visitors. The new exhibits mix classics from the museum’s collection with modern art in a way that is illuminating to both, exploring the roles of viewer and viewed in art. A number of upcoming programs, including a Family Day, offer excuses to go look around, but this lively and diverse grouping of sculpture, painting and photographs shows the Hood is on a mission to do more than present art — it wants you to think about it.
“My favorite is the next generation native art,” the docent confided, after compelling this reporter to surrender her pen. “I’m an anthropologist, so I like the Native American collection and the modern works shown near each other.”
The “Self-reflections” photography exhibit explores the idea of exploitation and representation. Whose picture is it anyway? The subject, or the person taking the picture?
This exhibit leads with a self-portrait by Vivian Maier, whose trove of street photographs was discovered accidentally by a stranger. Maier took thousands of photos of people on the streets of Chicago, but never showed them to anyone. When her discoverer sought her permission, Maier was already dead, leaving no heirs. Without permission from Maier herself, should the photos be shown?
Tierney Gearon’s photos of her mentally ill mother in various scenes also beg the question of consent. How much does her mother understand? The one on display here depicts Gearon, with her back to the room, naked and straddling a partly clothed man on a hotel bed. Her mother sits on the adjacent bed, laughing.
Nikki S. Lee’s “Ohio Project” involved the Korean Lee living in an Ohio trailer park for a while, adopting the clothes, postures and manners of the residents there. Ohio Project 8 shows Lee in a pink belly shirt, with cut-off shorts and dyed blond hair, leaning out of the doorway of a trailer home, her arms outstretched to hold the door frame. Everything about the photograph —the doors, which look like closet doors attached to an outdoor frame, Lee’s open-armed gesture —shouts “American trailer park,” our cultural basement to which foreign visitors are not invited. What does it mean to see a Korean adopting this culture? As we look at the picture, are we seeing how Lee sees us?
The modern pieces in the collection remind the viewer again and again that our ability to see others is affected by the relationships between those making the picture, and those in it.
Fred Wilson’s “Ota Benga” reclaims a bust of Ota Benga, the unfortunate Mbuti (Pygmy/bushman) man who was exhibited in the monkey collection at the Bronx zoo in 1906 and later committed suicide. Wilson’s bronze casting of Ota Benga includes a silk scarf that discreetly covers the original taxonomic label (the original sculpture was done from life in 1904) to preserve Benga’s dignity.
Nearby, “Portraits of the Indian As An Artist” is “a visual reclamation of personal and collective identity” by contemporary indigenous artists.
“Zig’s Reservation,” for example, is a black and white photograph of a man in a war bonnet standing on strip of long grass in front of a city skyline. A sign proclaims: “Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation.” Below it, another sign prohibits, among other things, hunting and taking photographs.
Photographer Zig Jackson wrote: “Why do I have to go and photograph Indians on a reservation? Why can’t I be my own reservation?”
The exhibit challenges the viewer to acknowledge that the act of portraying someone can be an act of dominance or collaboration; to wonder, how accurately do we really see others? And what is involved in the art of seeing?
The Hood Museum of Art, as a teaching museum, “is committed to helping visitors develop visual literacy skills — the ability to construct meaning from all that we see,” according to a brochure next to the Mark Rothko (No. 8; Lilac and Orange over Ivory) painting.
On Family Day, Feb. 3, visitors (age 4 – 12) are invited to participate in activities and create their own artworks to take home.
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