The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. is starting to show its hand ahead of October’s long-awaited reopening of its rethought and improved sculpture garden. The museum has announced the first round of acquisitions for its overhauled garden, redesigned by Hiroshi Sugimoto, with a lineup that leans heavily on contemporary names now entering the institution’s orbit.
The group includes works by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Together they sketch out the institution’s pitch: a garden that still nods to its modernist roots while making a more forceful case for the present.
A few of the works give a sense of how that balance will play out. De Othello’s crumpled box fan turns a domestic object into something closer to a monument, folding in questions about air, heat, and memory. Grotjahn, best known for his paintings, contributes a bronze “mask” that began life as a discarded box. Halsey’s column, wrapped in signage from South Central Los Angeles and topped with a portrait of her grandmother, pushes directly against the idea of who gets commemorated on the National Mall.
Elsewhere, Halfmoon’s stacked stone figure draws on Caddo traditions, Kato’s painted aluminum form channels animist storytelling, and Reyes’s volcanic stone sculpture nods to pre-Columbian cosmology. Larner and Puipia round things out with works that play, respectively, with abstraction and the tension between tradition and modernization.
All of it will sit inside Sugimoto’s redesign, which has been underway since 2022 and marks the most significant change to the campus since it opened in 1974. The museum is also widening entrances, adding shade and seating, and reworking circulation.
Below, a look at five of the works that will appear in the sculpture garden.
