Hirshhorn Blog

Monday, June 30, 2008

Letter from the Acting Director: Summer 2008

Dear friends,

This summer promises to be an especially eventful one for the Hirshhorn, and I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from our upcoming exhibitions, events, and initiatives. To celebrate the opening of Realisms, part two of The Cinema Effect, our eight-month exploration of moving-image art, we will host a Meet the Artist talk with renowned filmmaker and Realisms artist Isaac Julien on June 19 and After Hours on June 20. I am pleased to note that After Hours has become one of the most popular arts events in Washington. Be among the first to see the exhibition, as well as the new Currents: Recent Acquisitions installation and Black Box: Kimsooja, and enjoy live performances and music until midnight. Return to the Black Box in August to see the eye-popping scientific imaginings the artists known as Semiconductor created during their residency at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley.

The Sculpture Garden continues to be a popular destination for visitors. A new work commissioned from conceptual artist Dan Graham and the return of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, provide more reasons to stop in and enjoy the grounds. Graham’s sculpture titled For Gordon Bunshaft, is an engaging two-way mirror and lattice pavilion, while Ono’s Wish Tree, a gift from the artist, continues to inspire participation from thousands of visitors who tie their wishes to its branches.

Monday, June 30, 2008

art surrounds you

Creative collaborations with artists energize us. We work with artists to create exhibitions and programs and encourage their involvement in unexpected ways. Artists help us rethink our practices, re-envision our spaces, and reinvigorate our visitors’ experiences. When we conceptualized the Hirshhorn’s first institutional advertising campaign, we naturally turned to artists to help convey our message and identity.

“Art Surrounds You” is the central idea driving the advertising campaign. The Hirshhorn is housed in an iconic circular building designed by Gordon Bunshaft, in which art literally surrounds you.
Beyond that, we wanted to encourage people to think about the act of looking, to explore new ways of seeing, and to recognize the aesthetic value in commonplace objects and moments as well as artworks.

The Hirshhorn is thrilled to have Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kota Ezawa, as well as DC-based artists Linn Meyers and iona rozeal brown contributing artwork to the campaign. We invited these artists to choose or create an image that references circularity and is inspired or influenced by the phrase “Art Surrounds You.” The artists responded with their own unique and creative perspectives. Sugimoto and Tillmans chose appropriate images from their existing work, while brown, Ezawa, and Meyers chose to create new work for the campaign.

The first ad appeared in the March Museums section of The New York Times with a full-page piece featuring a photograph of the Hirshhorn by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Monday, June 30, 2008

New Art

Louise Bourgeois’s "Legs," 1986, from the Hirshhorn's collection.

Among the works most recently acquired by the Hirshhorn is French-born artist Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture Legs, 1986, a gift from Trustee Ginny Williams in honor of former Director Olga Viso. Bourgeois is one of the most influential sculptors in contemporary art. She represented the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale and was the first artist commissioned to create a monumental sculpture for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, London.

Many of her works refer to the human body, usually by indirect allusions (such as empty clothing and furniture), but she has also sculpted fragments of anatomy. Legs is her largest, consisting of long, attenuated, vertical limbs—each one ten feet tall but only two inches wide. Suspended from the ceiling, the legs dangle so that the tiny feet hover slightly above the floor. The immediate effect is one of precariousness, of a person stretched by unseen causes.

Over her 60+ year career, Bourgeois has developed a powerfully inventive corpus of sculptures drawing upon the ideas and styles of major artistic movements. From Surrealism and primitivism to Conceptualism and feminism, she has employed a wide variety of traditional and modernist techniques, such as carving stone, modeling wax and plaster, casting bronze and resins, and incorporating found objects.

Her autobiographical references, including intimate memories of her childhood and sexual fantasies, inform her compositions and impart a sense of loss, mystery, and regret.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Dan Graham: "For Gordon Bunshaft"

Dan Graham's For Gordon Bunshaft, 2006, from the Hirshhorn's collection

The Hirshhorn has commissioned a new piece for the Sculpture Garden by conceptual artist Dan Graham. “For Gordon Bunshaft” (2007) is a site-specific work placed near the reflecting pool that consists of a triangular pavilion with two-way mirrors and an open wooden lattice. The two-way mirrors allow visitors standing both inside and outside to simultaneously see themselves and each other as well as the surrounding landscape simultaneously. Graham has described these structures of mirror and wood as hybrids: one side derived from traditional Japanese architecture, while the other two sides allude to modern corporate architecture and Bunshaft’s design of the iconic Hirshhorn building. Graham has long been recognized as one of the key figures in the evolution of conceptual art. This commission affirms the Hirshhorn’s emphasis on working with living artists and incorporating contemporary pieces into its noted Sculpture Garden. This is the first work of the artist to enter the collection.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

From the Chairman

Dear Friends:
I write to you with a mixture of pride, anticipation, and sadness. As you may know, in January, Olga Viso joined the staff of our sister institution, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as its fifth director. Olga was with the Hirshhorn for twelve years in several roles, including director for the last two years. Although we hate to lose her, we are thrilled for her and grateful for what she accomplished in her time here.

During Olga’s tenure as a curator, deputy director, and director, she made great strides for the Museum as a scholar, a creative leader, and an administrator. The Hirshhorn took on increasingly experimental and challenging contemporary projects while, at the same time, striving to be more welcoming, inclusive, and attuned to the needs of its audience with programs like After Hours, Friday Gallery Talks, and ArtLab for Teens.

Olga helped create a vision for the Hirshhorn that focuses on contemporary artists and the many ways in which they work and see the world. These efforts have brought us in-depth retrospectives of artists like Ana Mendieta and major acquisitions to the collection by artists such as Ann Hamilton and Robert Gober. She also encouraged the Museum to commission new work, which sometimes took unconventional forms that went beyond the walls of the Hirshhorn, including an original sound piece by Janet Cardiff, twelve billboards by Felix Gonzalez-Torres placed around metropolitan DC and the Baltimore area, and a seventy-foot banner by Jim Hodges that stretched across the building proclaiming “don’t be afraid” in dozens of languages.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Marsha Reines Perelman joins Board of Trustees

Marsha Reines Perelman has joined the Hirshhorn’s Board of Trustees. An accomplished entrepreneur, Perelman has also made her mark as a philanthropist. Mrs. Perelman is the first woman to chair the Franklin Institute, founded around 1825 in Philadelphia. She is a trustee of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman Education Foundation, Inc., which supports Jewish cultural and welfare organizations, as well as art and history museums and other cultural institutions. She and her husband Jeffrey are prominent collectors of postwar and contemporary art. The Perelmans were listed in the summer 2005 and 2006 ARTnews “200 top collectors.” 

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

New Curator

Evelyn Hankins

Evelyn Hankins has been appointed Associate Curator, Modern Art. She will provide stewardship and further develop the Hirshhorn’s collection with particular emphasis on pre-1960 works. In addition, Dr. Hankins will conceptualize and realize a range of Museum programs, including collection installations, exhibitions, and commissions. Hankins earned her Ph.D. in art history, specializing in twentieth-century art, from Stanford University in 1999. Most recently, she was the curator of collections and exhibitions at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Previously, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Hirshhorn curators visit Latin America

Shared trends of the contemporary international art world, as well as the unique history surrounding art made in Latin America over the past five decades, were key motifs woven through a recent two-week research trip made by Hirshhorn curators.

Curator Anne Ellegood and Associate Curator Kristen Hileman visited Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. They traveled to six cities, visiting artists, galleries, museums, and private collectors, experiencing work by emerging as well as established artists in each city.

They saw works by members of a young collective in Santiago, Chile, who explore the properties of media as diverse as gold paint and sugar paste. Stops at the Lygia Pape estate in Rio de Janeiro and the 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Allegre, Brazil, were highlights of the trip. At the Biennial, an innovative group that brought artists’ voices into a collaborative curatorial process was complemented by an in-depth survey of the work     of Jorge Macchi, whose studio Ellegood and Hileman also visited in Buenos Aires.

Made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian’s Center for Latino Initiatives, the trip ensured that our curators are up-to-date on trends and important developments in the art of Latin America.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Other Recent Acquisitions

Continuing its tradition of collecting the work of individual artists in-depth, the Museum has purchased an installation consisting of multiple c-prints and inkjet prints by Wolfgang Tillmans that were on view at the Hirshhorn in summer 2007. The photographs span the years 1992-2007 (a range that covers almost the entirety of Tillmans's career) and comprise examples of the many sizes and genres in which Tillmans works. Included are a monumental recent abstraction and some of the artist's most iconic images from the 1900s—a rainbow appearing over a simple Shaker building and portraits of night club habitues. This grouping complements Tillmans's Concorde Grid, 1997, already part of the Hirshhorn's collection.

Also new to the collection is Wayne Gonzales’s painting Pentagon, 2004–05, the gift of Danielle and David Ganek, Mark Rosman, and Jill and Peter Kraus. Gonzales mines iconic images from the American political and economic landscape to select his imagery. Made through the accumulation of multiple “pixels,” the artist’s paintings straddle abstraction and representation. By painting Pentagon a shimmering metallic silver, the well-known aerial view of the building becomes even more fixed as a symbol of American military prowess and power. The large format and optical undulation of the surface cause the image to vacillate, seeming both beautiful and daunting. This is the first painting by this impo

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Works from the Panza collection acquired by the Hirshhorn

Joseph Kosuth Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass--a Description, 1965, from the Hirshhorn's Collection, The Panza Collection, photo by A. Zambianchi-Simply.it, Milan.

Robert Barry, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, and Doug Wheeler are some of the most prominent artists of our time. Works by these artists are part of a new acquisition of thirty-nine objects from the collection of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Hirshhorn is one of a priviledged few institutions that Panza has invited into his collection, one of the world's great troves of American contemporary art. Sixteen major artists are represented in the group of mostly conceptual and California Light and Space works made primarily in the late 1960s and 1970s.

These acquisitions substantially bridge the gap in the Hirshhorn's collection of conceptual art while also rounding out holdings by specific artists, and, in several cases, providing and overview of an artists' career. In nine instances, these are the first works of a particular artist to be acquired by the Museum. Many of the selections have been made with the intention of forming room-sized installations of works that best showcase each artist.

Panza worked closely with Acting Director and Chief Curator Kerry Brougher to choose the individual pieces, helping him select a substantial body of works that create coherent groupings. Brougher's association with Panza dates back to the mid-1980s. An installation of these intriguing artworks will be on view in fall 2008.