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.
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Mark Grotjahn, Untitled
Image Credit: Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden This is one of Grotjahn’s “mask” works, which started as discarded boxes with faces hiding in their design. Here, it’s cast in bronze, turning something throwaway into an object that’s oddly permanent.
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Chatchai Puipia, Wish You Were Here, 2008
Image Credit: Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden This sculpture was gift from collectors Aey Phanachet and Roger Evans in honor of Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary. The monumental bronze depicting shows Puipia’s lower body wrapped in a traditional Pha Khao Ma cloth. The missing upper half lets the viewer decide if the figure laying in the grass is in a dream state or trapped somewhere we can’t see.
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Pedro Reyes, Tonatiuh, 2023
Image Credit: Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden This one began with a boulder from the hills of the Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico. Carved from volcanic stone, the work nods to the sun god it’s named for. Reyes’s sculptures bridge contemporary art with techniques derived from pre-Columbian art and Mexican modernism.
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Raven Halfmoon, Dancing at Dusk, 2024
Image Credit: Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Raven Halfmoon’s work, a carved stone figure with stacked faces and a striking headpiece, draws on ancestral tradition and the modern life of a Native American. The headpiece in this work references the ornamental regalia worn by female Caddo dancers.
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Liz Larner, 6, 2010–11
Image Credit: Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Two bright, interlocking forms, one crumpled and the other smooth and straight, twist into something like an “X.” The work is a continuation of Larner’s exploration of the “X” motif.
