By Marguerite Serkin

John Stomberg was appointed the first Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in January of 2016. A specialist in American and European modernist art, Stomberg’s experience includes directorships at the Mount Holyoke Art Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art.

The Hood has one of the oldest and largest collections of art and artifacts in the United States, dating to 1772. The museum annually organizes more than 150 programs for col- lege, public and regional school audiences.

Artscope’s Marguerite Serkin interviewed Stomberg for some candid thoughts about the reopening of the museum following extensive renovations, and the special qualities of working with a teaching museum of international prominence.

MARGUERITE SERKIN: The Hood is undergoing a major expansion. How will the new venue better serve the museum’s curatorial needs and allow for additional exhibitions and events?

JOHN R. STOMBERG: The new Hood will include several areas of dramatic improvement. First, the entrance will be very clear, inviting, and easy to find from the middle of Hanover. There will be a large atrium area that joins the museum with the Hopkins Center that can be used by students, faculty, and general visitors to relax and enjoy — this will also be a spectacu- lar events space. We are adding an entire center of teaching galleries for the cur- ricular use of college faculty. And, most noticeably, we are adding six new galleries and completely renovating all the others, so we will have 50 percent more space to display art.

MS: What is the projected timeframe for the reopening of the museum?
JS: We anticipate being open by very early 2019.

MS: During the expansion, the Hood Museum has opened a gallery space in downtown Hanover, the Hood

Downtown. Has public engagement with the gallery been robust, and are there plans to keep the Hood Downtown open when the Museum has reopened?
JS: The public response to our Hood Downtown shows has been remarkable. We are on track to post 2017 attendance figures at about 60 percent of that for 2015 when we had the full museum up and running. A large part of this suc- cess has been our continued teaching work with the college and with area schools, but we have found the “on the street” location to be very inviting. When the new Hood is open, the Downtown space will be returned to retail use — the Museum proper will offer everything we need.

MS: How has your previous experience as director of Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and of the Williams College Museum of Art, informed your role at the Hood? JS: My career has been fully occupied in the teaching museum field. In many ways, working at the Hood is the summation of my professional training, which started at the Boston University Art Galleries (BUAG) over 20 years ago. BUAG was not a collecting institution, however, and I was eager to work with a permanent collection. I moved to Williams College Museum of Art, and there my first major project was to convert a public gallery into a study gallery. Over nearly a decade there, I learned first-hand the advantages of a robust collection. At Mount Holyoke I was able to work with an even larger and more diverse collection that also included an American material culture museum. Now, I am hon- ored to have over 65,000 objects from which to select as we plan the reinstalled galleries for the new building.