On the Hood, “Visual Kinship” Examines Family By way of Photography

Photography has been a pivotal software in defining identities since its inception two centuries in the past. Studio portraiture, ethnographic pictures, government-issued identification, and household snapshots all outline their topics otherwise primarily based on their context. “Visual Kinship” at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum presents a spectrum of photographic works by twentieth-century and up to date artists to survey the methods during which pictures can outline the notion of household and connection. The 4 curators, Alisa Swindell, Thy Phu, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Iyko Day, give attention to the medium’s means to champion visibility within the face of marginalization and erasure.

Drawn from the Hood Museum’s assortment and loaned works from Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, “Visual Kinship” options thirty-eight works that unfold throughout three gallery areas, every devoted to a theme—relationality to land, formations of household, and kinship of care. Opening with Relationality, the present argues that we outline ourselves not simply by means of familial ties however by means of our connection to put and land. Coyote Park’s Pacific Diaspora Kin (2022) units the tone, displaying the artist embracing members of their chosen household amid a rolling, grassy hillscape. Their nude our bodies are harmoniously interwoven, conveying a way of particular person and collective id formed by means of their connection to one another and the panorama.

Rania Matar’s neighboring portrait, Alae (with the mirror), Beirut, Lebanon (2020), exhibits a contemplative younger lady searching over the Bay of Beirut. She gazes towards the stays of the storage constructing that exploded in 2020 from improperly saved ammonium nitrate, killing a whole lot of individuals and destroying surrounding neighborhoods. The use of the mirror and Alae’s placement within the body, observing the panorama that has partly outlined her id, heightens the load of her rumination as she considers her future. In the wake of such destruction, does she keep in a house that has revealed itself to be unsafe? What will occur to her Lebanese id if she leaves?

The Kinship and Care part is maybe essentially the most conventional software of kinship, main with Carrie Mae Weems’s basic Untitled (Make-up with Daughter) (1990). Weems, seated on the finish of a kitchen desk reverse the digicam, applies lipstick in entrance of a mirror as her daughter does the identical. This rigorously crafted portrayal of their bond elicits the habits and rituals of femininity which are handed down from one technology to the following.

Proximate works I Look Like My Momma (Self Portrait 1980) (2019), by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, and Grandma Ruby, Mom and Me at Mom’s House (2005), by LaToya Ruby Frazier, are in poetic dialog, exploring the concept of inheritance from maternal forebears. Wearing make-up and their mom’s fur coat, Terrell seems unwaveringly on the viewer of their self-portrait. According to the wall textual content, the title got here after the photograph was taken, when Terrell’s mom remarked that they regarded identical to her, capturing the indescribable means during which our household lineage is mirrored in ourselves. Frazier, who is thought for documenting the post-industrial panorama of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, exhibits three generations of her household. Leaning in opposition to the chair her grandmother sits in and resting a hand on her mom’s shoulder, Frazier memorializes the place and the household that has formed her.

Kali Spitzer’s Be & Madeline (2022), during which a mom and her grownup nonbinary little one embrace, builds on this notion. The photograph, a part of Spitzer’s An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance: Kin sequence, paperwork familial ties to counteract the continuing erasure of Indigenous and mixed-heritage individuals. In this work, Be and Madeline match collectively like two puzzle items, supporting one another and conveying the energy of their bond by dealing with the viewer instantly. Like different works on this part, Spitzer makes use of physicality and presence to translate the emotional and religious bonds between members of the family into visible expression.

The center gallery options a variety of works that deal with how social and political points intersect with private id, with a selected give attention to the consequences of cross-cultural migration. Two of the strongest examples use textiles to redefine the {photograph}, embodying the Formations of Family theme by tying the pictures to cultural traditions and household lineages.

Eun-Kyung Suh’s Nathan Twedt (2015) wades into the layered identities of transracial adoptees. Part of a bigger sequence, Suh requested Korean-born adoptees to mirror on their experiences of being raised in white American households. Twedt’s portrait is transposed and fragmented right into a sequence of sheer, sq. textiles impressed by Korean wrapping cloths known as bojagi. Arranged as an incomplete sq., the fabric varieties what the artist calls a vessel, bridging Twedt’s Asian heritage together with his white upbringing. In his contemplative expression, Suh captures the loss Twedt grapples with on this hybrid, liminal id.

In a close-by case, 5 embroidered headshots from Nancy E. Rivera’s ongoing Family Portrait sequence inform the artist’s immigration story by means of her household’s collective expertise. In a nod to her grandmother’s cross-stitching, Rivera renders government-issued identification pictures into embroidery floss on cotton cloth. The works’ versos reveal the overlapping threads, talking to the entanglement of her Mexican American identities. Using a craft handed down by means of generations, Rivera transforms a software of state surveillance into milestones in her household’s journey from one dwelling and tradition to a different.

Other works on this area lose the thread. Tseng Kwong Chi’s San Francisco, California (1979) is a part of the artist’s East Meets West sequence, during which he donned a Zhongshan, or Mao, swimsuit, and performed the persona of “Ambiguous Ambassador,” posing subsequent to iconic American landmarks. There are parts on this work which are echoed in different images on show—the sequence is, partly, a cultural critique of stereotypes and Asian id in Western tradition. It is tough to discover a familial narrative on this work, even when the definition of relationality has been stretched to incorporate connections to land and tradition. It is likely one of the moments within the present during which the main focus appears to be extra on id formation writ giant, moderately than the methods during which household buildings and influences id.

The last gallery is dimly lit and devoted to Sim Chi Yin’s site-specific set up The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten, (2022–2023). Ten picket workstations illuminate magic lantern slides Yin has doctored to incorporate pictures of her son and her grandfather. Yin’s grandfather, a Malayan anti-colonial activist, was executed in 1949 and by no means met his grandson, however the two meet within the various universe the artist created. On the far wall, Sim’s movie Time Travels With A Rotten Suitcase (2025) loops by means of a sequence of magic lantern slides that contrasts the tropical fantastic thing about Southeast Asia with the brutality of British rule, significantly throughout the twelve-year anti-colonial struggle often known as the Malayan Emergency. Sim spins a speculative model of her household story by repurposing a visible software of colonialism. She doesn’t erase the horror and exploitation of the unique pictures, however she presents a brand new, private context during which to grasp this historical past.

“Visual Kinship” is a well timed exhibition, significantly within the context of a faculty campus on this historic second. It presents a chance to search out commonality and to think about the methods during which our particular person identities are formed by societal and cultural forces. In a “post-truth” period the place we will create life like pictures by means of immediate technology and should query every little thing we see on-line, it might probably really feel as if pictures is experiencing a tectonic shift. Yet “Visual Kinship” foregrounds two issues. Its enlargement of what constitutes lens-based reminds us that artists will proceed to push the medium into new territory, and its give attention to traditionally marginalized identities demonstrates the worth of utilizing pictures as a software to create a broader sense of self.

“Visual Kinship” is on view on the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College by means of November 29, 2025.