The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden used its 50th anniversary year to dramatically expand its collection, announcing 314 new acquisitions in 2025 that reflect a broader push into photography, mixed-media work, and artists shaping contemporary American visual culture.
The acquisitions range from large-scale mixed-media works by Lorna Simpson, Sarah Sze, and Mickalene Thomas to documentary photography by Danny Lyon and Graciela Iturbide, as well as major gifts tied to the museum’s current exhibitions, including works by Adam Pendleton and Mark Bradford.
“There has been a deliberate effort over the last few years to deepen certain areas of the Hirshhorn collection, particularly photography, mixed media practices, and the artists who are defining American visual culture including Marilyn Minter, Lorna Simpson and Mickalene Thomas,” museum director Melissa Chiu told ARTnews. “What made 2025 significant was that those priorities converged with the momentum of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary.”
Mickalene Thomas, Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur (2012). Gift of Ellen Susman, in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary. Photo by shootArt. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
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Chiu said the anniversary helped spur major gifts from artists and longtime supporters, many of whom already had deep relationships with the museum. “Several acquisitions also grew organically out of artists’ ongoing engagement with the Hirshhorn,” she said, pointing specifically to Bradford’s Shattered Lightbulb and Pendleton’s Spray Paint Originals Archive. “So, while the year saw an extraordinary number of important acquisitions, it was very much the result of long-term relationship-building and a sustained curatorial vision.”
That anniversary framing runs throughout the acquisitions list. The museum said several of the gifts were specifically tied to its 50th year, including Simpson’s large-scale mixed-media work Vista (2025), Sze’s sprawling sculptural painting High Tide (2025), and Thomas’s nearly 11-foot-wide Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur (2012).
One of the biggest additions is the first tranche of a promised multi-year gift from collectors Doug and Toni Gordon: 176 works forming the foundation of an archive dedicated to Pendleton’s works on paper. The archive includes hundreds of spray-paint studies and screen-printed compositions made between 2019 and 2023.
The museum also continued building on recent exhibition histories and institutional priorities. A group of 13 contemporary Chinese works expands on the legacy of the Hirshhorn’s 2022 exhibition “A Window Suddenly Opens,” while a newly acquired Thomas Houseago sculpture currently on view in the museum’s “Revolutions” exhibition places the artist into conversation with canonical modernists already in the collection, including Willem de Kooning and Alberto Giacometti.
Photography emerged as another major focus. Alongside Iturbide and Lyon, the museum acquired nine photographs by architectural photographer Ezra Stoller documenting the Hirshhorn’s opening in 1974, ahead of the reopening of its sculpture garden next year. The museum also received 19 gelatin silver prints and a drawing by photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.
The acquisitions bring the Hirshhorn’s holdings to more than 13,000 works.
