The Hood Museum of Art is hosting “The New Now: Art, Museums, and the Future,” an event that is bringing back to campus a number of alumni who have built their careers in the museum world.

The Oct. 25-26 symposium, which is free and open to the public, is part of Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary celebration, and one of several events the museum staff has organized over the past year since the renovated and expanded Hood opened its doors in January 2019. Symposium panels will take place in the Hood’s Gilman Auditorium.

“Dartmouth alumni—many of them past Hood interns—are making their mark on museums around the country and helping to shape how people will experience the museums of the future,” says John Stomberg, the Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood. “The symposium is an opportunity to celebrate them and to engage them in a conversation about how the ambitions of museums are changing.”

In addition to a Friday evening opening discussion on the future of museum practice, sessions will address the role museums play in shaping who controls the past; the collaborative relationship between curators and conservators; and the role and future of academic teaching museums such as the Hood.

During a luncheon on Saturday, undergraduates are invited to meet the panelists and discuss careers in museums and the arts.

Among the museums represented are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the Osage Nation Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and more. The alumni staff of the Hood will be represented as well, by Deputy Director Juliette Bianco ’94 and Amelia Kahl ’01, the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Academic Programming.

For the full symposium schedule, visit the symposium website.

Hannah Silverstein can be reached at hannah.silverstein@dartmouth.edu.