HANOVER, N.H.-The Hood Museum of Art's collections at Dartmouth College, like many other museum collections, are varied and idiosyncratic, and many of its greatest riches stem from the imagination and collecting impulses of individual curators and donors. Celebrating Twenty Years: Gifts in Honor of the Hood Museum of Art, on view from June 11 through December 11, 2005, will showcase exceptional works of art that have been generously offered by Dartmouth alumni and friends as recent outright and promised gifts to the museum in honor of twenty years of the Hood Museum of Art in the postmodern building designed by Charles Moore and Centerbrook Architects. These important gifts will greatly enhance the museum collections and highlight the tremendous generosity of Dartmouth friends and alumni. In addition, they will expand the museum's ability to provide Dartmouth students and faculty and all visitors to the museum with direct and meaningful encounters with original works of art.

Hood curators Katherine Hart, Barbara MacAdam, Barbara Thompson, and T. Barton Thurber will lead a gallery tour on opening day, Saturday, June 11 at 2:00 p.m. in the second-floor galleries.

Featured works will include George Bellows's magnificent lithograph Village Massacre, part of a group of World War I prints that helped prompt the United States to enter the war in 1917, which will join two other powerful lithographs already in the collection by the artist from the same series. Similarly, Paul Sample's painting Speech Near Brewery, a promised gift to the college, will reunite with the oil sketch that is currently in the Hood's collection and become part of the museum's larger repository of Paul Sample's works.

Other important outright and promised gifts to the museum's collections featured in this exhibition include two richly glazed works by the late ceramicist Beatrice Wood, a vessel by the Native American artists Maria and Julian Martinez, famous for the lustrous black surface of their ceramics, and the most important tile created by the Boston arts and crafts pottery firm of Grueby Faience Company. Paintings by Australian artists Magdalena Ungwanaka and Pansy Martin Napangardi and Haitian painted objects by André Pierre, Sisson Blanchard, and another unknown Vodou artist are the first works of this type to come to the Hood, further enriching a wide and diverse collection of non-Western art. The gift of a Yoruba religious sculpture from Nigeria is also an important contribution to the museum's African holdings.

Other recent and intended gifts include important works by Charles-Francois Daubigny, William Trost Richards, Jesse Talbot, John Adams Parker, J. Alden Weir, Irving Wiles, John Folinsbee, Alexander Archipenko, Rufino Tamayo, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Artschwager , and Robert Henri. The Hood has also been promised what will be the museum's first prints by the eccentric visionary James Ensor and a color woodcut by the master printmaker Gustave Baumann.

Contemporary works by Kathleen Gilje and Paul Chan will enrich the collection through their engagement with issues such as the relationship between copy and original and the meaning of monuments in a post-September 11 world, respectively. Lastly, the magnificent canvas by Carle Vanloo is the first large-scale, multifigure European mythological painting to enter the collection, filling a long recognized gap. All of these works and many others that have been given or promised to the Hood Museum of Art by generous donors make this collection what it is and help shape what it will be in the future. This exhibition was generously funded by gifts to the Hood Museum of Art.