These Colorful Contemporary Artworks Just Joined the Hirshhorn Museum as the D.C. Landmark Celebrated Its 50th Anniversary

The museum is also preparing to reopen its redesigned sculpture garden, featuring new works from eight artists, this fall

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

May 18, 2026 11:00 a.m.

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The Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announced last week that it acquired more than 300 pieces of modern and contemporary art in 2025, growing its permanent collection of more than 13,000 items in conjunction with the celebration of its 50th anniversary.

An act of Congress established the museum in 1966, and it opened in 1974 in a building designed by Gordon Bunshaft to serve as “a large piece of functional sculpture” floating above a garden of outdoor artworks. During the museum’s first six months, 1 million visitors saw the inaugural show of 850 works.

Many of the museum’s new acquisitions were made possible through gifts in honor of the big birthday. These include the 11-foot-long painting Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur (2012) and Vista (2025), a large mixed-media painting “that combines screen-printed photographic fragments with layered fields of blue pigment to evoke polar and otherworldly landscapes,” according to a museum statement.

“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,” Melissa Chiu, the outgoing museum director, tells ARTnews’ Daniel Cassady.

A significant share of last year’s acquisitions were screen-printed and spray-painted artworks by Adam Pendleton, a painter who calls his conceptual artistic framework “Black Dada.” Some of his more recent pieces are currently on exhibit at the Hirshhorn, through early January 2027, in a show titled “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen.”

“Painting is, for me, a way to be my most present self,” Pendleton told the New York Times’ Pierre-Antoine Louis in 2025, ahead of the show’s opening. “I hope that aspect of the act of painting, the act of making, of doing, is not necessarily understood by the viewer, but felt.”

Shattered Lightbulb (2014)—a layered piece that combines newsprint, colored paper and architectural plans of Hong Kong—was also donated to the museum. It is the work of another Hirshhorn mainstay, Mark Bradford, whose 400-foot-long mixed-media tapestry Pickett’s Charge (2017) flows across the walls of the museum’s third-floor inner ring.

“It’s almost like a tree,” Bradford said in an interview with the Hirshhorn about the canvases comprising Pickett’s Charge. “If you cut it, you can kind of count the layers.”

Photographs given in honor of the museum’s anniversary include 16 documentary heliogravures by Graciela Iturbide—a Mexican photographer who “documents the uneasy cohabitation of ancient cultural rituals and contemporary adaptations and interpretations,” according to the International Center of Photography—and 18 gelatin silver prints from Danny Lyon’s famed The Bikeriders series, which documented life in the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club in the 1960s.

Nine photographs depicting the Hirshhorn museum during its 1974 opening, made by Ezra Stoller, were also acquired, reflecting the institution’s “commitment to cementing relationships with artists who have made significant interventions on our campus,” Chiu says in the statement.

The museum also expanded its collections from international creators, bringing in its first work made by an Australian Aboriginal artist—Yumari (2019) by Pepai Jangala Carroll—and 13 contemporary pieces from China. The latter acquisition builds on the museum’s recent survey of Chinese photography, “A Window Suddenly Opens.”

Hirshhorn patrons have more to look forward to later this year, when the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden officially reopens in October following a multi-year renovation. The redesigned space, about 1.4 acres, will feature newly acquired sculptures by eight artists: Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia and Pedro Reyes.

Museum officials hope these works—which include the carved stone figure of Halfmoon’s Dancing at Dusk (2024) and the multicolored cuboids of Larner’s 6 (2010-11)—will imbue the garden, located on the National Mall, with life.

“It was hidden in plain sight,” Chiu tells the Art Newspaper’s Gabriella Angeleti. “We expect the renovation to triple visitation.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.