Qualla: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Joseph Hirshhorn arrived at Ellis Island in 1907 as a six-year-old Latvian Jewish refugee. He left school at thirteen to work as a Wall Street runner. By twenty-six he was a millionaire trading stocks. In 1953 he gambled most of his fortune on Canadian uranium prospects in northern Ontario, and within two years his Rio Algom and Algoma Mining shares had turned him into one of the largest single uranium suppliers to the United States Atomic Energy Commission during the early Cold War. He sold the uranium interests in 1955 for more than fifty million dollars. He then spent thirty years buying art. The collection he assembled, twelve thousand sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints, was given to the United States in 1966. Lyndon Johnson and Smithsonian Secretary Dillon Ripley fought to keep it on the National Mall. It has lived there since 1974, inside a concrete drum nobody expected.

Image: Postdlf | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Cylinder

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, CC BY 3.0. Architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed the museum in 1969 as an open cylinder of pre-cast concrete elevated on four massive piers. The drum is eighty-two feet tall and 231 feet in diameter. Its hollow center forms a circular interior courtyard with a f...

Image: Sebastian Wallroth | CC BY 3.0

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Why It Is Here

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Congress had been authorizing a federal museum of contemporary art on the Mall since the late 1930s. The National Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1941, was largely a museum of older European masters, with no remit for modern American or international work. The need persisted but no ...

Image: Postdlf | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Sculpture Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. The recessed garden across Jefferson Drive from the main building was designed by Lester Collins and dedicated in 1981. It is sunken about ten feet below the street level of the Mall, creating a sheltered space for sculpture that is partly hidden from passing pedestrians. Major l...

Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Collection

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingfbruno, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Hirshhorn now holds about twelve thousand objects spanning the late nineteenth century to the present. The focus is on art made since World War II, with significant collecting in the contemporary moment. Major holdings include Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, He...

Image: Ingfbruno | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Bubble That Almost Was

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2009 then-director Richard Koshalek announced an ambitious plan to install a 145-foot inflatable structure called the Seasonal Inflatable Structure across the museum's exterior. Designed by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Bubble would have temporarily transformed the cy...

Image: Joe Ravi | CC BY-SA 3.0