Visual Kinship appears to be like at how pictures shapes our sense of relationality to each folks and locations
How does pictures each form and disrupt the notion of household? This is without doubt one of the questions confronted by the Hood Museum of Art’s fall exhibition Visual Kinship, on view August 30 by November 29, 2025. It options lens-based works from the Hood Museum’s assortment, loans from Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and a site-specific set up by artist Sim Chi Yin. Several of the works are newly acquired by the Hood and shall be on view for the primary time on the museum. Taken collectively, these artists search to broaden our strategy to how we acknowledge {our relationships} with others and when these change into (or are rejected as) a sort of kinship. The exhibition is co-curated by Alisa Swindell, affiliate curator of pictures, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth; Thy Phu, distinguished professor, Arts, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough; Kimberly Juanita Brown, affiliate professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, and director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, Dartmouth; and Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College.
Visual Kinship attracts upon three frameworks to discover the connections between pictures and kinship: relationality to land, formations of household, and kinship of care. From its inception, pictures has served quite a few roles as a signifier of identification, particularly concerning one’s place inside socially and governmentally decided techniques, together with state-sanctioned familial relationships. In the late Nineteenth century, small private cameras grew to become out there, which led to the creation and recognition of household picture albums as a way of visually acknowledging kinship. However, ties of blood and the nuclear household should not the one methods to grasp kinship, and pictures has lengthy performed a job in these different visible paradigms as nicely.
As co-curator and conceptual originator Thy Phu says, “Visual Kinship challenges us to see family not as a fixed structure but as something formed through connection, nurtured through care, and continually reimagined. From colonial archives to refugee dreams, the photographs in this exhibition reveal how images shape our sense of belonging, trace the ties that bind us, and open up new ways of being in relation.”
Visual Kinship hopes to supply guests with new methods to consider belonging and the assorted techniques that assist or refute emotions of connection. It additionally sheds gentle upon how perceptions of kinship are mediated by pictures, particularly by up to date artists who use archives, authorities paperwork, and media tropes as their beginning factors. The photographs vary from concepts about how we maintain onto ties of kinship to critiques of the advanced processes that legitimize familial connections to explorations of the acts of care that deepen friendships till they change into households of alternative.
In her Family Portrait sequence, for instance, Nancy Rivera makes use of cross-stitch to recreate pictures of herself and her mother and father which have been used to legitimize their citizenship paperwork. Rivera selected the sort of needlecraft, handed down throughout generations of girls in her household, to recreate these pictures as a way of connecting herself to traditions that had been in some methods misplaced to her by the immigration course of. Other artists, like Zig Jackson, use humor to image connections to a spot or a land. In his self-portrait titled China Basin District (damaging 1997, print 1997–98), Jackson performs into media photographs of Native Americans by sporting a headdress whereas posting indicators that pronounce the reclamation of stolen Indigenous land.
All three exhibition frameworks come collectively in Sim Chi Yin’s site-specific set up The Suitcase Is a Little Bit Rotten. The iteration of this venture commissioned for Visual Kinship consists of ten up to date variations of Nineteenth-century amusements, magic lanterns, and a video work that’s premiering within the exhibition. Sim has created interventions concerning the colonial pictures printed on magic lantern slides to talk to her household’s multigenerational histories and the way in which colonialism, struggle, state violence, and immigration have impacted these relationships.