Artist Talks

In Conversation

Alex Da Corte’s vibrant installations and mesmerizing video works can be found just as readily at major international art ventures, such as the 2019 Venice Biennale exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times, as on an electronic billboard in Times Square, New York. His visually stimulating and intellectually compelling work spans across a variety of media, including video, installation, sculpture, and painting, and takes cues and inspiration from contemporary pop culture. As a self-proclaimed “anthropologist of the immediate past,” he mines everyday objects from consumer culture to transport viewers through otherworldly experiences created with otherwise mundane, familiar images and items. A long-time Philadelphia resident, Da Corte has an extensive, personal history with the Marcel Duchamp galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a connection that becomes clear through the elevated status of the everyday through his work.

Radical Acts: Alex Da Corte On Marcel Duchamp

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Outro

Joan Brown 
b. San Francisco, California, 1938–1990 
Nun with Staffordshire Terrier 
1961 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Joan Brown: Nun with Staffordshire Terrier

Mary Cassatt 
b. Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, 1844–1926 
Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant) 
c. 1894 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Mary Cassatt: Young Girl Reading (Jeune fille lisant)

Janet Sobel 
b. Dnipro, Ukraine, 1894–1968 
The Attraction of Pink 
1945 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Janet Sobel: The Attraction of Pink

Aliza Nisenbaum 
b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1977 
Mis cuatro gracias (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge) 
2018 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Aliza Nisenbaum: Mis cuatro gracias (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge)

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Exster 
b. Białystok, Poland, 1882–1949 
Marionette
1926 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Exster: Marionette

Anni Albers 
b. Berlin, Germany, 1899–1994 
Under Way 
1963 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Anni Albers: Under Way

Lee Krasner 
b. Brooklyn, New York, 1908–1984 
Siren 
1966 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Lee Krasner: Siren

Flora Yukhnovich 
b. Norwich, England, 1990 
Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too 
2022 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Flora Yukhnovich: Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too

Intro

Georgia O’Keeffe 
b. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887–1986 
Goat’s Horn with Red 
1945 

Embedded in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Katy Hessel’s Museums Without Men audio tour will invite audiences to come closer to nine works by women artists on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Goat’s Horn with Red

Irish-born American artist Sean Scully joined the Hirshhorn for the opening of Sean Scully: Landline, an installation of oil paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that transforms the Museum’s Second Level inner-circle galleries into a current of color and energy. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of color, the Landline paintings mark a transition in Scully’s artistic career, uniting his earlier hard-edged minimalism with his richly constructed painterly abstractions. Largely comprised of horizontal stripes, these gestures toward the land, sea, and sky (and the indistinct borders between them) navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of those interactions.

In conversation with Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu, Scully discusses this remarkable series and explore the layers of his artistic practice, one that continues to impact the greater landscape of contemporary abstract art.

Artist Talk: Sean Scully

A special morning talk featuring Deane Madsen, former design editor of Architect Magazine and founder of Brutalist DC. Learn how Deane turned his love of Brutalism, a key DC architectural style, into a web platform and map of Washington’s most “raw” structures, including the Hirshhorn Museum, DC Metro, and the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Hirshhorn/AM: Brutalist DC

Mark Beasley, the Hirshhorn's Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, Curator of Media and Performance Art, led a conversation exploring intersecting themes of the body, music, and performance, inspired by the Museum’s first exclusively live work by acclaimed contemporary artist Tino Sehgal. This You features a solo female singer who connects with visitors to produce intimate and memorable experiences. Expanding on the work of Conceptual artists, Sehgal employs the voice and movement rather than traditional art materials to create his works.

Beasley joined by David Levine, visual artist and theater producer; Julia Simpson, trainer for This You performers; and Drew Daniel, member of the Baltimore-based musical duo Matmos, discussed methods of staging the body and the historic use of music, from pop to avant-garde, by contemporary visual artists.

This You: Body, Music, and Performance

The Hirshhorn’s largest interactive technology exhibition to date features three major installations from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series. The show will be the DC debut for the Mexican-Canadian artist, who is known for blurring the lines between art, technology, and design. Lozano-Hemmer will fill the Museum’s entire Second Level with immersive environments that use heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors’ own biometric data. At a time when biometry is used increasingly for identification and control, this data constitutes a new way of representing both anonymity and community.

Artist Talk: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

One of the most inventive artists working today, Charline von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her artworks reconsider and challenge longstanding conventions of composition, color, abstraction, beauty, and narrative by employing a unique visual language.  Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates monumental paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”

More than thirty of her large-scale paintings are included in Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes, the largest US museum survey of her work to date. Organized in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this multinational exhibition highlights the significance of von Heyl’s dynamic and constantly evolving practice.

Artist Talk: Charline Von Heyl

Nato Thompson, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Pedro Reyes, and Paul Ramirez Jonas
In the spirit of Ai Weiwei’s commitment to driving social and political change, the first installment of “In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent” offered an exploration into the power of art to raise awareness and inspire action amid politically and culturally tumultuous times.  Nato Thompson, artistic director of Creative Time, led a wide-ranging conversation with artists Laurie Jo Reynolds, Pedro Reyes, and Paul Ramírez Jonas on how their art directly confronts legislative and social issues, and engages contemporary audiences.

In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent (Part I)

Evan Osnos, Tania Bruguera, Eric Gottesman, and Hank Willis Thomas
For the second installment of “In Conversation:  Awareness, Action and Dissent” the panel continued to explore the power of art to raise awareness and inspire action amid politically and culturally tumultuous times. The New Yorker journalist and former Beijing bureau chief Evan Osnos moderated a discussion between artists Tania Bruguera, Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman.  Bruguera, Thomas and Gottesman have made headlines in both the art world and political world, notably by standing up for freedom of speech and through the creation of the first art based Super PAC.

In Conversation: Awareness, Action and Dissent (Part II)

Veteran New York art critic Jerry Saltz joined the Hirshhorn Museum to offer his latest take on the state of the art world and “How to Be an Artist,” with “rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively).” Saltz is senior art critic for New York magazine and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018.  His winning article, “My Life as a Failed Artist,” is a candid essay about his unsuccessful art career, the disappointment that came with it, and how it ultimately turned him into a critic. Saltz is known for his forthright insight into galleries, museums, and artworks and has been a pioneer among his peers in the adoption of social media as a platform for criticism in the twenty-first century.
For this program, Saltz offered his thoughts on criticism and the arts today in conversation with Charlotte Burns, executive editor of the In Other Words podcast. Burns was previously the US news and market editor for The Art Newspaper, as well as a regular correspondent for publications such as the Guardian and Monocle.

Critics in Conversation: Jerry Saltz

Artist Inge Mahn and Hirshhorn Curator-at-Large Gianni Jetzer take a close look at Schulklasse [School-class] (1970), a recent Museum acquisition and the newest addition to the exhibition What Absence Is Made Of. Mahn graduated from the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, where she studied under Joseph Beuys, and has exhibited internationally. Her stark plaster works reexamine everyday objects that are at once easily recognizable and hauntingly distant. In celebration of the first time Schulklasse is on display at the Museum, Mahn and Jetzer discussed the seminal sculpture and the experiences and historical moments that inspired the artist’s creations over the last forty years.

Artist Talk: Inge Mahn

Kyle McDonald is a contributor to open source arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks and builds systems that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways, such as the face detection code used in the software for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence. One of the most important creative coders working today, Kyle often shares ideas and debuts projects in public before they are completed. He creatively subverts networked communication and computation, explores glitch and systemic bias, and extends these concepts to confront everything from identity to relationships.

Artist Talk: Kyle McDonald

Smithsonian Heritage: Family Festivals

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Meet the Artist: Barbara Kruger

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts

Meet the Artists: Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres

Lecture: Panel Discussion: Art and Social Change

Friday Gallery Talk: Conservator Tatiana Flores on Jesus Rafael Soto

Meet the Artist: Sugimoto's Vision: A special lecture by Michael Fried

Hank Willis Thomas, artist and co-founder of the For Freedoms artist collective, teamed up with Emily Shur, photographer and designer, to reimagine Norman Rockwell’s 1943 series Four Freedoms, inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address. Using the four freedoms articulated during Roosevelt’s speech—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear—For Freedoms created an updated tableau that highlights a much more inclusive America than what was originally styled in Rockwell’s iconic scenes.

In Conversation: Reimagining Norman Rockwell’s America

In this opening conversation, architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt joins University of Waterloo School of Architecture colleagues Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay, with The Evidence Room Foundation executive director Alan Ginsberg, to share the origin story of The Evidence Room. The co-creators drew inspiration from the architectural forensic evidence presented by van Pelt in a landmark libel case in 2000 as irrefutable proof that Auschwitz was purposefully designed for efficient mass murder. This groundbreaking research led to the proliferation of the use of architectural forensics, a discipline encompassing architecture, technology, history, law, and human rights.

In Conversation: Origins of the Evidence Room

On the eve of the public opening of Pat Steir: Color Wheel, Steir and Hirshhorn senior curator Evelyn Hankins for a discussed her long career and the making of her monumental installation.

Artist Talk: Pat Steir

Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Garber-Maikovska joins Hirshhorn assistant curator Betsy Johnson for a discussion on his diverse work that spans drawing, painting, video, installation, and performance. His practice stems from an idiosyncratic vocabulary of movements that he has developed and refined over the past several years. In his paintings, this translates into frenzied, expressive lines and color that he applies flat on the ground with sweeping movements above the canvas. His performances are similarly indecipherable; often set in nondescript, semi-public spaces, such as restaurants or commercial parking lots, his choreography is an outgrowth of a desire to find ways to insert creative play and nonsensical communication into the sphere of everyday life.

Artist Talk: Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Acclaimed director, designer, performer, artist, and writer Robert Wilson joined Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu in conversation about his decades-long career of redefining art, design, and the theater experience.

Re-Setting the Stage: In Conversation with Robert Wilson

We explore the art and artists of our time through groundbreaking exhibitions, performances, and a world-class collection.

Hirshhorn Museum

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks