Hirshhorn announces over 300 acquisitions expanding collection in its 50th-anniversary year

Thomas Houseago, Minotaur—Janus, 2024. Plaster, redwood, hemp, rebar, charcoal, and pastel. Gift of Thomas Houseago in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary, 2025. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo: Rick Coulby.

WASHINGTON, DC.— The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced 312 acquisitions of modern and contemporary art to the collection in 2025. Spanning mixed-media, photography, painting and sculpture, these additions reflect the Hirshhorn’s attention to the American artists who are shaping the nation’s visual history, such as Adam Pendleton, Danny Lyon, Theaster Gates, Marilyn Minter and Lorna Simpson, as well as the perspectives of leading global artists, including Joseph Beuys, Pepai Jangala Carroll, Ryan Gander, Graciela Iturbide and Zhang Dali. Each addition will be conserved, photographed, studied and stored until public presentation.

“Acquisitions made throughout our 50th-anniversary year, including 50th-anniversary gifts, bolster long-standing areas of focus within the national collection, notably photography, and introduce works by important working artists, including Thomas Houseago, Marilyn Minter and Ezra Stoller, to its holdings,” said Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “Several acquisitions, including nine architectural photographs made by Stoller of Hirshhorn at its 1974 opening, also reflect our commitment to cementing relationships with artists who have made significant interventions on our campus.”

Lorna Simpson, Vista, 2025. Acrylic and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass. Promised gift of Sandra Masur and Scott Spector in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary. © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: James Wang.

Among the 2025 acquisitions are several major pieces by American artists working in mixed-media. Artworks by Simpson and Mickalene Thomas—gifts made in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary—address themes of memory with conceptual and material ambition. Simpson’s “Vista” (2025), a large-scale mixed-media painting, combines screen-printed photographic fragments with layered fields of blue pigment to evoke polar and otherworldly landscapes as metaphors for endurance, survival and remembrance. A seminal figure in contemporary American art, Simpson is now represented by four works in the Hirshhorn collection. Composed of rhinestones, acrylic paint and oil enamel on a wood panel, Thomas’ “Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur” (2012) telegraphs the significance of domestic interiors through its bold composition and—at almost 11 feet long—its imposing proportions.

Pepai Jangala Carroll, Yumari, 2019. Synthetic polymer paint on linen. Gift of John Wilkerson in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Courtesy of D Lan Galleries, New York

The first 176 works of a promised multi-year gift by Doug and Toni Gordon, also made in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary, form the foundation of an archive of Adam Pendleton’s works on paper. His “Spray Paint Originals Archive” (2019–2023) comprises hundreds of paintings that are produced through an iterative process of spraying, photographing and screen printing. Together with the acquisition of “Shattered Lightbulb” (2014) by Mark Bradford—an intricately layered painting in which architectural plans of Hong Kong housing projects are fused with newsprint and colored paper to reflect the political and economic forces shaping the city—these gifts build on the museum’s long-standing engagement with both artists, whose work is currently on view in “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” and Bradford’s landmark installation “Pickett’s Charge” in the third-floor inner ring.

Significant folios by Iturbide, Lyon and Stoller expand the museum’s collection of documentary photography that captures built environments and countercultural lives in North America during the 20th century. Iturbide’s 16 heliogravures on paper (2025) further expand the collection’s dialogue with portraiture. The Hirshhorn also has been gifted 18 gelatin silver prints from Lyon’s “The Bikeriders” (1963–1967), a landmark series, simultaneously spontaneous and intimate, created during the artist’s immersion in renegade American motorcycle culture. Stoller’s 1974 series of nine photographs of the Hirshhorn both underscore the museum’s 50th anniversary and anticipate the opening of its revitalized sculpture garden in 2026. Complementing these documentary approaches, a significant gift of 19 gelatin silver photographs and one drawing by Joel-Peter Witkin made between 1981–1994. These works introduce Witkin’s elaborately staged photographic tableaux that draw on art-historical, religious and still-life traditions to confront intertwining themes of beauty and morality.

Ryan Gander, Ever After: A Trilogy (I... I... I…), 2019. Animatronic mouse and hole in a wall. 7 min. © Ryan Gander. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Many acquisitions bolster global representation and extend throughlines within the collection. A meditation on landscape and memory, Carroll’s “Yumari” (2019) is the first work by an Australian Aboriginal artist to enter the Hirshhorn collection. Thomas’ “Minotaur—Janus” (2024), meanwhile, demands reflection on personal and classical mythologies. Now on view in “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,” the hulking sculpture—another 50th-anniversary gift to the Hirshhorn—engages in visual conversation with long-held Modernist masterworks by artists such as Willem de Kooning and Alberto Giacometti. Gander’s “Ever After: A Trilogy (I . . . I . . . I)” (2019), a site-responsive installation featuring a small animatronic mouse peeping out of the gallery wall to play with viewers’ responses. The first work by the contemporary British artist to enter the Hirshhorn collection is an exemplar of his facility with connecting the everyday to the abstract.

The Hirshhorn has also acquired artworks that build upon its exhibition history. Thirteen contemporary Chinese artworks from the collection of Lillian Heidenberg, including seven works by Zhang Dali and one each by Lin Tianmiao, Qi Zhilong, Shi Xinning, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Huan and Zhou Zixi expand the global breadth of the Hirshhorn’s collection. These works collective support the legacy of “A Window Suddenly Opens,” the Hirshhorn’s 2022 survey of contemporary Chinese photography, which was itself rooted in a promised gift of 141 works to the Hirshhorn by collector Larry Warsh.

Pinaree Sanpitak, Breast Vessel in the Reds, 2021. Acrylic, pencil, and feathers on canvas. Gift of Aey Phanachet and Roger Evans in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary, 2025. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Courtesy of the artist and Ames Yavuz. Photo: Aroon Permpoonsopol

In 2025, the Hirshhorn also acquired significant artworks by:

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones
Christine Ay Tjoe
Devon DeJardin
Patrick Eugène
Alex Gardner
Teo González
Alteronce Gumby
Zhang Hui
Wyatt Kahn
Suchitra Mattai
Sabine Moritz
Yu Nishimura
Tony Oursler
Joyce Pensato
Calida Rawles
Adrián Villar Rojas
Pinaree Sanpitak
Athena Tacha
Hank Willis Thomas

Artworks acquired in 2025, including several that will be announced in advance of the reopening of the sculpture garden, join the more than 13,000 works in the national collection of modern and contemporary art.