A Profile of Dartmouth’s Nearly Perfect Hood Museum

With an expanded building and great collection, it excels at teaching students and locals alike.

T he Hood Museum in Hanover in New Hampshire is one of the crown jewels among America’s hundreds of college and university art galleries. Oh, hell, why diplomatically hedge? So unlike me. It’s as close to perfect as a museum can be. If it’s not the best college art museum, it’s surely in the top three.

The Hood belongs to Dartmouth College but, unlike Dartmouth, it isn’t an old institution. Dartmouth owned lots of art through haphazard gifts, but it didn’t establish a modern museum in a purpose-made building until 1985. I visited last week for the first time in a few years owning to the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis, which kept the Hood closed longer than almost all museums in America.

This is on Dartmouth, not the museum. Dartmouth, like most chichi private colleges, chased a zero-Covid regime à la Don Quixote but without the romance. Much of this was hygiene theater and a ruse. It made livin’ easy for the school’s army of highly paid academic bureaucrats. They “worked” from home, in between trips to the ski slopes, while students endured inferior online learning, lockdowns, and endless nasal invasions. Definitely not what “To Dream the Impossible Dream” envisioned.

Open the Hood is now, and I loved what I saw. The museum closed in 2017 for a long-planned $50 million renovation and addition. In the few months between the completion of this project in 2019 and the Covid lockout, I just didn’t get to Hanover to visit. So, it’s been about five years. The beautiful, bigger, fresh, and sparkling Hood is something to savor.

First, the collection. The Hood’s 60,000 works of art span 5,000 years of human creativity. It has many strengths, but I’ll note the crème de la crème. Dartmouth is an old, prestigious school, established in 1769 to acculturate Native Americans in Christian, Anglo values, broadening its mission to train ministers and, before long, to educate bright young men such as Daniel Webster, Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Frost, Fred Rogers, and call him mister, and Theodor Geisel, and call him Dr. Seuss. Its alumni are far-flung, adventurous, curious, and acquisitive, and this explains such objects as the Hood’s six massive slabs of Assyrian relief sculpture.

Dating from around 860 b.c., they were in the palace of King Ashurnasirpal in ancient Nimrud. A group of Dartmouth alumni acquired them in 1855 for $600. Dartmouth hoped that “monuments of wicked nations and of heathen artists’ recorded history of their heathen masters and of their false gods” would persuade students to study the Old Testament more seriously. Convoluted, I know, but the reliefs are at the Hood and command an entire gallery not far from the entrance.

Like the best college museums, the Hood has at least one of everything so professors and students can cover all aesthetic bases. It has a peak Rothko — Lilac and Orange over Ivory— done in 1953, and Picasso’s Guitar on a Table, from 1912, which was Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’s favorite work by the artist. It was a gift from Rockefeller and was his favorite, too.

Since I’m an American-art specialist, I always visit the Hood’s American galleries. The museum always has a good collection of portraits and nice New Hampshire things. Museums get these things along the way. What makes the Hood special is its smart, prescient purchases. It bought, for example, Lilly Martin Spencer’s Jolly Washerwoman, from 1851, on the cusp of her rediscovery. Spencer’s an outlier not only because she was a woman. Her scenes of everyday life are robust and funny. She paints dimwit husbands, clotheshorse ladies-of-the-house, and, in the Hood’s picture, an Irish washerwoman who looks happy to have a job.

Maria Oakey Dewing is well known now and a better painter than her husband, Thomas. Dewing was part of the Cornish art colony, so she summered and painted in New Hampshire. Her Irises, from 1899, is so perfect chromatically. It embeds the viewer, too, since we get an “iris’s eye view.” The Hood bought it just before she became famous. I think it’s one of the loveliest still lifes from an American artist.

The Hood has bought well among these artists, gathering a great haul of White Mountain art. I can’t call these things, such as Régis Gignoux’s majestic New Hampshire (White Mountain Landscape), regionalist just because they’re in a New Hampshire museum, depict a New Hampshire scene, and were done by artists who lived part time in New Hampshire.

Bonnie MacAdam was the Americanist at the Hood, for 30 years, I think. She drove these and many other acquisitions. It’s a case of an experienced, devoted curator developing a vision for her collection through intimate study. Then, there’s a sense of what’s a good buy. She knew the alumni, too. Together with the Hood’s directors, and I know them all, going back to Jim Cuno in the early ’80s, she found the money to get good things.

I love it when curators find hidden quality, or gems among the bramble, and pounce. It’s a risk to spend on an artist who’s canon-worthy but, for lots of reasons, not in the canon. MacAdam has a good eye.

I tootled around the Hood mostly on my own but spent some time with Michael Hartman, the very good new American-art curator. His first purchase as a curator, Boat Yard on the East River, is by William Louis Sonntag. Hartman’s a canny spotter, too. He’s got the best taste.

I love seeing a young curator’s first acquisitions. This is a good one. Sonntag is a very, very fine painter but not well known. I think he gets lost among Church, Bierstadt, Kensett, and Gifford. The painting itself is an industrial scene from the early 1870s, and that’s rare in American art for this time. It’s Romantic-style, too, and looks like something Cole would have done 30 years earlier. A boatyard on the East River looks forlorn and ramshackle after work’s done. But in a blazing red sunset, and with Sonntag’s talent, it looks like a Roman temple, close to ruin but still having a whiff of the gods. It’s small, and in art big tends to be bad. Its paint still looks wet, which tells me it’s in great condition, but that wet-paint look makes for immediacy as well.

The Hood’s doing something very smart with its American and Native American art. It’s got a permanent collection show devoted just to the latter, but, in its American galleries, it’s mixing Native and Anglo art. Indigenous art is, in my opinion, American art, but that’s a radical view. Native American art is usually viewed as ethnographic art and kept separate. In its galleries, a lovely Georgia O’Keeffe Western landscape from 1930 finds new meaning from a Native textile with mountain motifs. Side by side, they look great.

The museum has a good and growing Native American collection but, until the last couple of years, never did much with it. Now, the Hood is displaying and energetically interpreting its historic Native things, mostly ceramics and textiles, and buying contemporary art. The star artist of the Hood’s Native American art show is the photographer Cara Romero, whose work I didn’t know. She creates big, bold images of Native women. Romero grew up on a reservation in California.

Lots of Native American contemporary art concerns what’s called decolonization. This is the quest for economic, cultural, and psychological freedom from Anglo values and, ultimately, for Indigenous sovereignty. This is a thicket and a labyrinth and usually a dead end since Native Americans are, after all, Americans. Romero’s a good artist, and I look at her work as high-quality art and not solely as Native American art, with her heritage as one among many things to consider.

Some of the Native art on view at the Hood is environmental art with themes such as “you stole our land” and “don’t tread on me” with, for example, an oil pipeline. “You stole my land” is a tough sell as gripes go, since private property isn’t a concept that Indigenous tribes knew and, though the history of Indian reservations stinks to high heaven, Anglo settlement unfolded in a thousand ways. Not all Native land was “stolen.” I’m from the “Drill, baby, drill” school, too, so I look at this art with skepticism. That said, the Native art is poignantly layered and very appealing.

The Hood has a good teaching collection of European art. It’s got a nice, big Perugino-and-friends painting and good French Rococo things, a first edition of Goya’s Disasters of War portfolio, forever timely given that there’s always a war happening, and a complete set of Picasso’s Vollard Suite. I think there are only seven such sets, since the rest were sold as single sheets. It’s priceless and a tour of Picasso’s mind.

Grumbles abounded when the Hood’s wonderful curator of European art, Bart Thurber, left for Princeton’s museum and wasn’t replaced. But the Hood’s academic curator, who works most closely with students, has a Ph.D. in European art and covers the field just fine.

Of all the fields in the collection, European art doesn’t have heavy hitter after heavy hitter. The Hood’s Oceanic collection, though, is superb. It’s got great Aboriginal things, too. These Pacific things came as an idiosyncratic gift, but they play a big part in making the museum a special place. The masks, headdresses, sculpture, and artifacts from everyday life are enchanting. Yes, I do love art with feathers, and, yes, Polynesia evokes color, palm trees, and beaches. I think having so good and so unusual a collection in New Hampshire is the stuff of dreams.

The Hood’s not neglecting its European art, which is well contextualized from a scholarly viewpoint. Classes use it all the time. Right now, it’s interpreting less-developed areas. The museum acquired the Oceanic art as a gift in the 1980s. It’s time it got the lovin’ once reserved for the Italian and French art.

I’ll say a few things about the building. Hood’s expansion was long in coming. Its current site in the heart of campus opened in 1985. Charles Moore was the architect. It’s a perfect postmodern building, whimsical in parts and, overall, planned in total sync with the needs of students. The galleries were, from the beginning, graciously proportioned and versatile, too.

The building, alas, had two big problems. First, it wasn’t visible from the street. Visitors accessed it through a narrow open-air courtyard wedged between two other college buildings. It ended in a cul-de-sac and the front door. The Hood was built around this cul-de-sac.

Cold, concrete, and a favorite place for dead leaves to gather, the cul-de-sac entrance wasn’t the Hood’s happy place. No amount of signage convinced people driving down Dartmouth’s main drag or walking past the start of the courtyard that a delight awaited them at the end. Think a store without a storefront. The second problem was inevitable. The Hood outgrew Moore’s building.

The Moore building is still there. Now, though, the courtyard is enclosed, thanks to a restrained, confident expansion designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. It’s an expansive, comfortable space with sofas and tables and chairs for study and the welcome desk. It’s a nice events space used by the museum and by Dartmouth. It gives the Hood a front door that people can see.

The museum now has six new galleries and classrooms, too. Not all teaching happens in the galleries with paintings on the wall. The Hood has thousands of works on paper. They live in storage but are best seen in a classroom setting when they’re not in a show. Students find close proximity to art in a classroom exhilarating.

The fundraising job totaled $50 million, which seems reasonable to me. This money supported construction and a new endowment to pay for the expenses that a bigger building demands. Dartmouth cries poor but has an ample supply of billionaires. For years the most conservative, even libertarian, of the Ivies, it’s gone total Trot. Its unloved president is retiring later this year. May the new broom sweep clean.

John Stomberg is the Hood’s director. A photography scholar, he directed the Mount Holyoke museum, an exquisite gem, before coming to the Hood. He’s a calm, heartening presence. He has good taste and plays well with others. He shepherded the addition and has hired good people. I met him years ago when he was the deputy director of the college museum at Williams. His diplomatic skills are impressive.

I’m writing about the Hood’s expansion first and its contemporary collection second since the new galleries seem to me to be the perfect home for all the new things the museum has acquired. A new gallery with a 30-foot ceiling hosts a group of paintings by Thornton Dial that the Hood received as a gift from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The Hood also just bought a splendid Julie Mehretu painting in the past year or so. I don’t think it was in the Mehretu retrospective at the Whitney, but if it had been there, the show would have been better. I think the Hood’s new galleries perfectly accommodate contemporary art, which usually needs space.

Now, why top honors to the Hood? Part of it is history. The Hood was the pioneer in using art for interdisciplinary learning. It hired Kathy Hart in the late ’80s as a curator specializing in building relationships between the museum and English, history, theater, and science departments. Over 30 years, she demolished silos. The Hood, before long, collaborated widely and deeply as a habit and, now, a tradition.

At the same time, the Hood was a pioneer among college museums in reaching the locals, especially public-school children. The Hood’s educators developed a template for other college museums to use in making art meaningful to kids in grade school.

In the ’90s and until about 15 years ago, the Hood did big, splashy traveling exhibitions and scholarly books. It was a player on the national circuit. Dartmouth, at some point, probably didn’t want to spend the money. The Hood has a good, but not huge, endowment and gets a big chunk of its money from the college, so it dances to a tune that’s sometimes not its own.

Over many visits, I find the Hood to be so intimate, even with the expansion, and its art so eclectic and so endearing. It’s got the energy of college students. At the same time, its permanent-collection galleries are reassuringly filled with old favorites. The museum changes where we want change. It’s the same where we crave constancy.

This weekend I’ll write about the Hood’s exhibitions and its newest haul of art. Last year it acquired the Kobal collection of 6,000 movie-star photographs, almost all from Hollywood’s Golden Age and all shot by studio photographers. It runs from Buster Keaton and Theda Bara to Brando and Marilyn Monroe and covers the art of image-making at its most refined.