The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College is among the oldest and most prestigious campus-based museums in the United States. The origins of the permanent collection can be traced back to 1772, when a few natural science specimens first entered the “young museum at Dartmouth.” Collections grew steadily throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely due to the generosity of alumni and friends of the Ivy League institution. These donors were inspired by a talented faculty, who mounted ethnographic displays in the academic corridors of the Old Dartmouth Museum and, after 1929, at the top of Carpenter Hall, home to the Art History Department. In 1962, Wallace K. Harrison’s Hopkins Center opened, and an ambitious sequence of temporary ethnographic exhibitions took place in that modern art center, aided by the hiring of a professional curatorial staff. This multifaceted, but fundamentally scattered approach sufficed until 1981, when Charles W. Moore and Chad Floyd were commissioned to create a freestanding, state-of-the-art facility to house the entire breadth of the college’s collections. An unusual site, sandwiched between the existing Hopkins Center and the campus power plant, was given to the architects, who embraced the eccentricities of the relatively small footprint by producing a narrow, finely detailed structure with dramatic interior spaces and tremendous flexibility. The building, enabled through a gift from long-time college trustee Harvey P. Hood, opened to the public in the fall of 1985.
Today the Hood’s ethnographic collection is substantial, with some 1,800 African objects, 2,300 Oceanic works (including material from every major geographic region of New Guinea), 11,000 Native American pieces, and approximately 3,900 archaeological items from the above-mentioned areas. The collection has developed through gifts and museum purchases made possible by endowed funds. Some of the major donors to these collections include: Mr. and Mrs. George H. Browne (Native American and Archaeology), Frank C. and Clara G. Churchill (Native American); Mr. and Mrs. Victor M. Cutter, class of 1903 (pre-Columbian); Glover Street Hastings III (Native American); Emily Howe Hitchcock (Egyptian and pre-Columbian); Evelyn A. and William B. Jaffe, class of 1964 (African); the Harry A. Franklin Family Collection (Oceanic and African); Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Landmann (pre-Columbian); William Patten (Oceanic); Guido R. Rahr, Sr. (Native American); Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Native American); and Arnold and Joanne Syrop (African).
Due to revolving exhibitions of the permanent collection in this department, only fifteen or twenty ethnographic objects are on public display throughout the museum galleries at any given time. A rotation of these objects occurs every four or five months. While a study storage area provides limited accessibility to storage for students and academics, online (text only) searches of the permanent collection are available to the public via the Hood Museum’s Web site.