The late Hung Liu in 2015 created “Olympia Triptych,” melding gold leaf, digital transparencies, resin and hand-painting with lithography ink. It’s part of the touring exhibit “Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth,” on view Feb. 3 to June 22 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
WEATHERSPOON ART MUSEUM/UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
Radcliffe Bailey crafted the 2013 piece of art “Third Ward,” for which he used gold leaf, a carved wood lock, two iron pins, nails, bottle caps and a wood base. It’s on display Feb. 3 to June 22 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth.
COURTESTY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY IN NEW YORK
Going on display at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover on Saturday, a snarling lion with three padlocks on its chest is surrounded by graffiti in 2017’s “Invincible Kings of This Mad, Mad World.” Artist Gajin Fujita used spray paint, markers, 24k gold leaf, 12k white gold leaf, platinum leaf and gloss finish to create it.
Courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, California
WEATHERSPOON ART MUSEUM/UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
The late Hung Liu in 2015 created “Olympia Triptych,” melding gold leaf, digital transparencies, resin and hand-painting with lithography ink. It’s part of the touring exhibit “Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth,” on view Feb. 3 to June 22 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
WEATHERSPOON ART MUSEUM/UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
The late Hung Liu in 2015 created “Olympia Triptych,” melding gold leaf, digital transparencies, resin and hand-painting with lithography ink. It’s part of the touring exhibit “Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth,” on view Feb. 3 to June 22 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.
COURTESTY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY IN NEW YORK
Radcliffe Bailey crafted the 2013 piece of art “Third Ward,” for which he used gold leaf, a carved wood lock, two iron pins, nails, bottle caps and a wood base. It’s on display Feb. 3 to June 22 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth.
Courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, California
Going on display at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover on Saturday, a snarling lion with three padlocks on its chest is surrounded by graffiti in 2017’s “Invincible Kings of This Mad, Mad World.” Artist Gajin Fujita used spray paint, markers, 24k gold leaf, 12k white gold leaf, platinum leaf and gloss finish to create it.
HANOVER — The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College is going for gold with “Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth.”
Featuring the work of 17 artists, the traveling exhibit opens Saturday, Feb. 3, and will be on view through June 22.
Craftspeople have long pounded gold into thin sheets called leaves and applied in a process called gilding.
Across time and cultures, gold has been a metaphor for what people value most.
Symbolically, it stands for goodness, excellence, brilliance and wealth.
In the spiritual realms, gilding illuminates sacred texts, gives luster to holy spaces and casts a sheen over religious sculptures.
While use of gold leaf has countless historical traditions, the material also appears in the work of contemporary artists, who use it to highlight thoughts and questions about values and perceptions.
That includes a colorful piece by Gajin Fujita titled “Invincible Kings of This Mad Mad World, 2017,” in which a roaring lion with a snarling snout is surrounded by reams of graffiti.
It’s a way of calling attention to beauty in the overlooked or things thrown away and those who have been disempowered or forgotten.
If, as the saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold,” then the artists represented here offer an inverse proposition: perhaps the things that don’t shine are more worthy of attention.
Contemporary works by Titus Kaphur and Radcliffe Bailey as well as up-and-coming artists by Larissa Bates and Liz Glynn will be on view.
“The artworks included in the exhibition are rich not only in their materiality but also in the avenues they open up for discussions of history, identity and societal value,” said Ashley Offill, the Hood Museum’s curator of collections. “These questions are foundational interrogations of the past and society’s assumptions about value.”
Other artists represented are William Cordova, Angela Fraleigh, Gajin Fujita, Nicholas Galanin, Shan Goshorn, Sherin Guirguis, Hung Liu, James Nares, Ronny Quevedo, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, Danh Vo, Stacy Lynn Waddell and Summer Wheat.
“Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth” debuted at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina/Greensboro in 2022.
