Hood Museum to Open Satellite Gallery Downtown

If you’re missing the Hood Museum of Art while it’s closed for renovation, good news: The museum has just signed a lease on a gallery space in downtown Hanover.

hood-amidon-597.jpg

A temporary College art gallery—to be called Hood Downtown—will be located in the former Amidon Jewelers store on Main Street while renovations are underway at the Hood Museum of Art. (Photo by Robert Gill)

The gallery—to be called Hood Downtown—will be located in the former Amidon Jewelers store on Main Street, next to Molly’s Restaurant, and will open to the public starting in mid-September, says John Stomberg, the Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood.

“We will be having a series of changing exhibitions right on Main Street,” Stomberg says. “What’s great is that it’s at ground level, so it’s completely accessible and very inviting.”

The experience will be somewhat different from a visit to the Hood proper. “Hood Downtown won’t be a museum—it will be an outpost,” Stomberg says. The museum staff is planning a series of changing exhibitions of contemporary art, the first of which will be announced in the next few weeks.

Read more

Video: The Hood’s New Director on the Museum’s Future

Hood Museum of Art Prepares to Expand

The Hood: ‘Fully Engaged’ Throughout Construction

“We’re interested in making sure we have variety, so you can count on seeing new media, photography, painting, and drawings,” Stomberg says. “The goal is to be diverse geographically and in terms of media, and to present art that hasn’t necessarily been here at Dartmouth before. This is a moment to bring new things to Hanover.” 

The hope, he says, is for Hood Downtown to be surprising, fun, and community-oriented. “We’re going to show somewhat challenging contemporary art, but we want it to be a place where a family is comfortable coming in on a Saturday afternoon.”

And if you’re still missing the Hood’s permanent collection (most of which has gone into storage during the construction), there’s more good news. Seventeen museums across the country will be displaying some of the finest works from the Hood’s collections for the entire time that the Hood is closed.

The museums include:

• Amon Carter Museum of American Art
• Bowdoin College Museum of Art
• Colby College Museum of Art
• Columbus Museum of Art
• Currier Museum of Art
• The Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont
• Harvard Art Museums
• Middlebury College Art Museum
• Museums of Fine Arts of San Francisco / de Young 
• Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York
• Princeton University Art Museum
• Smith College Museum of Art
• Tampa Museum of Art
• Toledo Museum of Art
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Williams College Museum of Art
• Yale University Art Gallery