David Ebony
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Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art recently announced that it has received a gift of 39 major photographic works from the collection of Nancy and Tom O’Neil, a Dartmouth alumnus, Class of 1979. The photo treasure trove highlights recent works by 17 artists, including Edward Burtynsky, Dawoud Bey, Bryan Schutmaat, Naoya Hatakeyama, Brian Ulrich, Anderson & Low, and others. The examples are representative of some of the most prominent trends in late-20th and early 21st-century photography, and address a broad range of sociopolitical and environmental concerns.
“Nancy and Tom O’Neil have transformed the Hood’s growing contemporary photography collection with this gift, and along with it the museum’s ability to teach contemporary art and a wide swath of subjects across the curriculum,” said Hood Museum director Michael Taylor when accepting the gift. “We are particularly excited that this act of generosity on their part deepens our holdings of work by Ed Burtynsky, Abelardo Morell, and Fazal Sheikh, and also gains us our first examples of work by Dawoud Bey, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Richard Misrach, among others.”
“The Hood is a preeminent teaching institution and one of the Dartmouth community’s greatest assets,” the O’Neils remarked in a statement. “We are excited that works by these exceptional artists will now enrich the Dartmouth curriculum. Hopefully, they will nurture disruptive interdisciplinary scholarship that considers these important topics of our time.”
Longtime residents of Baltimore, Maryland, Tom and Nancy O’Neil have been collecting contemporary photography for over two decades, often developing substantial holdings of works by certain key artists. In December 2013 the couple donated a group of 24 contemporary photographs by many of the same artists to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The two museums plan to honor these gifts with a shared project once the Hood Museum of Art’s renovation and expansion is completed in 2019.
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