Designing for “The Hood”
Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College
Posters and Invitations
Project Description
Prior to the transition from Dartmouth College Museum & Galleries to the Hood Museum of Art, Charles Gibson designed invitations, posters, and catalogs for exhibitions in the Hopkins Center’s galleries.
To celebrate the founding and opening of its new building, the Hood Museum of Art asked Charles Gibson to design commemorative posters and collateral print pieces.
For the Cornerstone Ceremony, the Designer created an informal collage that evokes the conceptual origins and materials palette of the museum’s architecture. At the center, overlayed on yellow “trace”, is a sketch of the Hood’s ceremonial gateway by Charles Moore, design architect for the new facility.
For the Dedication poster, the Designer chose a different approach. Photographs of the museum’s standing seam roof and copper-clad cupola are cropped and juxtaposed to create an architectonic structure that echoes the ziggurat-inspired, stepped detailing deployed throughout Moore Grover Harper’s building. A tinted detail from one of the Museum’s pre-eminent holdings, the “Assyrian Reliefs”, fills out the background, allowing the black and white photography to assert itself in the foreground.