HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College will feature more than seventy paintings, drawings, and prints by Ben Frank Moss from September 13, 2008, through January 4, 2009. The exhibition Immanence and Revelation: The Art of Ben Frank Moss honors the artist's twenty years at Dartmouth College, where he has served as chairman of the Studio Art Department and, since 1993, as the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Studio Art. Ranging from expansive, luminous landscapes to intimate, nearly abstract still lifes, these works reveal the artist's fascination with lush color, essential forms, and an ineffable, enveloping presence beyond the subject at hand. The accompanying catalogue, which is the most comprehensive examination of Moss's career to date, includes extensive interviews with the artist conducted by Hood Director Brian Kennedy and an overview of Moss’s career written by his former student Joshua Chuang, Class of 1998, now an assistant curator at the Yale University Art Gallery. Immanence and Revelation: The Art of Ben Frank Moss represents the most substantial exhibition and publication ever devoted to this accomplished artist, and it inaugurates a planned series of Hood solo exhibitions and publications that will celebrate the work of Dartmouth’s senior studio art faculty in the coming years.

Ben Frank Moss will present the opening lecture, “Silent Sound/Invisible Stillness: A Mystery Experienced,” on October 3 at 4:30 in the Loew Auditorium at the Hood. Additional programming includes an introductory tour on October 4, a lunchtime gallery talk on October 21 in the form of a conversation between artist and guest catalogue essayist Joshua Chuang, and a dialogue on the intersection of art and poetry on November 1 between Michael Stone-Richards, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the College for Creative Studies, and Gregory Wolfe, Publisher and Editor of Image and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University. On November 15, Hood Director Brian Kennedy will join the artist in a special tour of the exhibition.

Moss has acted as visiting artist or lecturer at over seventy institutions and has had more than sixty solo exhibitions. His work is held by forty-three public collections. Although Moss’s early work centered on the figure and still life, in more recent decades he has focused almost entirely on landscape, often inspired by the profound spaces of the Pacific Northwest, where he spends his summers. Rather than painting on site or from photographs, he draws from his memory and imagination. As he told the Dartmouth College community in a 1994 lecture, his work reveals his wish to be captivated by a spiritual force something unseen but sensed.

This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum and generously supported by a gift from Katherine D. and John H. Krehbiel III, Class of 1991, Thayer 1992; a grant from the George Frederick Jewett Foundation; a contribution from the Dean of the Faculty Office; and the museum’s Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Fund and Eleanor Smith Fund.