HANOVER, N.H.- The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2005 with a yearlong focus on its richly diverse permanent collections and a number of engaging public programs. Since the official opening of the award-winning building in 1985, the Hood has been honored to serve as one of the region's premier cultural and educational resources. Recognized by the American Association of Museums as "a national model," the Hood is one of the oldest and largest college or university art museums in the United States, drawing nearly 900,000 visitors from around the world in the past twenty years.

The Hood staff is making the most of this anniversary by taking the opportunity to both celebrate and investigate the impact of the museum and its collections on the college and the community. The year begins with an exhibition organized by members of the museum's main constituent departments-anthropology, art history, classics, and studio art-and titled Critical Faculties: Teaching with the Hood's Collections. Visitors to the museum will also experience a newly reinstalled Kim Gallery, opening in February. The gallery will feature new interpretive materials on the Hood's signature ninth-century Assyrian reliefs, as well as the installation of some new objects. The highlight of the year is an outstanding traveling exhibition of the museum's finest American works on paper: Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art. Organized by Barbara MacAdam, the Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art, this exhibition opens at the end of March. In the summer and fall Celebrating Twenty Years: Gifts in Honor of the Hood Museum of Art will present important gifts from Dartmouth alumni and friends in honor of the anniversary. Also in the fall, the Hood has commissioned internationally renowned artist Fred Wilson, U.S. representative to the Fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003, to create a site-specific exhibition exploring issues of race, ethnicity, and ideologies of art, culture, and value as represented by the museum's collections.

Dartmouth's permanent collection began in 1772, just three years after Dartmouth College was founded, when a few natural science specimens were gifted to the fledgling institution. The completion of the Hood Museum of Art in 1985 allowed for the consolidation of the college's extensive fine art collections which grew substantially during the twentieth century, and for greater accessibility for students, faculty, scholars, and the public. The postmodern building, designed by Charles Moore and Chad Floyd of Centerbrook Architects, was made possible by a major gift from Harvey P. Hood, Class of 1918, and his family, for whom the museum is named.

Today, the Hood preserves approximately 65,000 works of art representing a broad range of cultural areas and historical periods. The breadth of the collection supports the college's teaching mission and encompasses a wide variety of specific art objects, including Native American, Oceanic, and African collections, old master prints, American colonial silver, portraits, paintings of the White Mountains region of New England, and major works of modern and contemporary art.

Central to the work of the museum is the development of a rich and varied exhibitions program that includes the implementation of shows inspired by the museum's own collections. This dynamic program has resulted in several significant traveling exhibitions that have defined the Hood as a serious and well-respected arts resource on both the national and international levels. Since its opening, the Hood has mounted almost four hundred exhibitions, including Here and Hereafter: Images of Paradise in Islamic Art (1991), The Age of the Marvelous (1992), Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France (1998), José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1932 (2002), and Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (2003). All of these exhibitions were accompanied by highly regarded scholarly catalogues. The shows traveled to institutions such as the High Museum of Art; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; the Asia Society; the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Cincinnati Museum of Art; and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The Hood's extensive outreach program engages approximately 10,000 area elementary and high school students and teachers annually through multivisit programs, teen workshops, and teacher institutes. Frequent scholarly lectures and symposia with experts in their fields, gallery talks by Hood curators and Dartmouth faculty, public tours, family-oriented programs, and free family guides provide accessible enrichment opportunities to campus and local community members. In this way, the Hood Museum of Art continues to build upon the vision of Dartmouth's administration and Charles W. Moore, who from the beginning imagined the institution playing dual roles as an academic research center and a good neighbor to its regional audience.

Katherine Hart, Interim Director and Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming, notes, "Over the past twenty years the Hood Museum of Art has evolved into a wonderful regional and academic museum with an national reputation. The staff of this institution is small, but it has accomplished wonderful things. We all look forward to the next phase of our development and thank our colleagues and the students at Dartmouth, the college's generous alumni, and our wonderful regional audience for their continued support of our collections and programs."