Hood Museum Appoints Associate Curator of Native American Art

The Hood Museum of Art has appointed Jami Powell as the museum’s first associate curator of Native American art. 

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Jami Powell will start her new job at the Hood in May.

Powell, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently a faculty lecturer in the American Studies Program at Tufts University. She has focused her research on American Indian expressive forms through an interdisciplinary lens. She has worked as a research assistant at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, was a Mellon Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum, and has published widely, with articles in Museum Anthropology, Journal of Anthropological Research, Museum Management and Curatorship, Museum Magazine, and First American Art Magazine.

“I am incredibly honored to be joining the Hood Museum of Art and Dartmouth—institutions with long-standing relationships with American Indian students, scholars, artists, and communities,” says Powell, who will join the Hood team in May.

“The vision that drives my research and curatorial practice is my desire to make museums and academic institutions places that truly belong to all of us, that speak to all of us, and that reflect our multiple and complex experiences in creative, meaningful, and relevant ways. The collection at the Hood reflects the multiplicity and diversity of American Indian experiences in the past and the present, and I look forward to building and exhibiting the collections with various American Indian artists, and particularly those who build on the legacy of imagining strong Indigenous futures.” 

John Stomberg, the Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood Museum of Art, says, “We are pleased to be advancing the commitment that Dartmouth has made to Native American studies through the establishment of a team at the Hood that will study, collect, and exhibit Native American art from the past and the present. Despite Dartmouth’s long interest in this area, this marks the first time the Hood will have a curator dedicated to its collection.” 

The Hood is one of the first art museums in the country to receive a recently announced Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative joint grant from the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The Hood received a three-year grant to hire an associate curator of Native American art, a Native American art graduate fellow, and a Native American art undergraduate intern to conduct research on the collections, collaborate with campus and community stakeholders to teach with the collections, and produce an exhibition in the museum’s galleries, accompanied by a scholarly publication. Powell’s hiring marks the beginning of the Hood’s grant activities.