The Hood Museum of Art houses approximately 60,000 significant pieces of art that are not displayed in its galleries, a hidden collection that began in the late 18th century.
"This is a students' gallery. Here exists a large body of work" researchers from many disciplines can draw from, Curator of Academic Programming Kathy Hart said. "It's very much like a library."
The collection includes over 300 preparatory drawings for the College's Orozco murals, the 90 prints of Picasso's Vollard Suite and a gift of over 1,000 pieces of oceanic art, she said.
The paintings are kept in flat sliding racks in a basement storage room and the non-framed pieces are kept alphabetically in special containers in a separate room.
The storage room has countless aisles of baskets, textiles and statues. These rooms can be accessed only by Hood staff members.
The entire Hood collection can be accessed by a College computer running the DCIS Navigator program. These records have a field for the work's location so that it can be found very easily. They also tell when the work was acquired, its medium, and digitized images are beginning to be added.
The Bernstein Study Storage Center, on the first floor of the museum, is where students and faculty can view works selected from storage.
The Hood registrar will help professors choose appropriate objects for class viewing and judge the merits of student requests before retrieving the works, according to Hart.
"Students can make appointments with me in advance if they have a real interest in seeing a work. I recommend that they go into DCIS first and then research it, though," Hart said.
"There is a lot to look at upstairs, so students should think very carefully before they decide to come in and use this. It's meant for the purpose of study," she said.
Hart encourages students to view the galleries before examining items from the storage collection.
"The way museums function is through their galleries. Storage is storage," Hart said.
"There are about 15 people in each class that uses Study Storage, a perfect size to look at things and discuss them. The students are gathered together with a reason and a purpose," Hart said.
Visiting curators, scholars and professors can access the works off of DCIS, but scholars lacking access to the Dartmouth network can make inquiries by mail or telephone.
"We have so many different types of things because history was so inclusive of many types of works. While we have a number of American political prints, we also have American paintings," Hart said.
