Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden to Reopen on the National Mall With Eight New Acquisitions and a Sugimoto-Led Redesign
A space long described as “hidden in plain sight” on the National Mall is preparing for a second life. The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is set to reopen its 1.4-acre sculpture garden later this year, introducing eight newly acquired works alongside a sweeping redesign intended to make the site cooler, more accessible, and more inviting for lingering.
The reopening will bring new sculptures by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes to the grounds. The group spans materially dense monumentality and playful, pop-inflected forms, with several works explicitly engaging questions of public memory and the body in space.
Among the new acquisitions is Raven Halfmoon’s “Dancing at Dark” (2024), composed of carved stone figures stacked vertically and topped with a headpiece that echoes regalia worn by female Caddo dancers. Chatchai Puipia’s “Wish You Were Here” (2008), a monumental bronze, presents the lower half of a reclining figure, a fragment that reads at once intimate and imposing at outdoor scale.
Woody De Othello’s “Cool Composition” (2026) takes a more mischievous approach to the garden’s climate and tempo. Shaped like a drooping, cartoonish box fan and finished in green automotive paint, the sculpture will be installed at the east overlook, positioned as a visual punctuation mark and a literal pause for visitors seeking shade.
Lauren Halsey’s “Keepers of the Krown (Antoinette Grace Halsey)” (2024) is conceived as a corrective to conventional monument-making. The work centers on a column wrapped in references that move between ancient Egypt and the artist’s home terrain of South Central Los Angeles, culminating in a portrait of her grandmother at the top. In a garden historically defined by Modernist restraint, the piece proposes a different kind of public marker: layered, personal, and insistently present-tense.
The revitalization project was launched in 2020 and is being spearheaded by the architect and artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has a long relationship with the Hirshhorn. The museum exhibited 13 of his “Seascape” photographs in 1999, organized by Neal Benezra and Olga Viso, and mounted the first North American survey of his work in 2006. More recently, Sugimoto redesigned the museum’s lobby in 2018, reshaping it into a space intended to streamline the visitor experience.
“Artists know what artists and audiences need,” the Hirshhorn’s director, Melissa Chiu, said, describing Sugimoto’s role as an additive one within the institution’s evolving identity. “Our collection is now modern and contemporary. Sugimoto is adding his layer to the palimpsest, one that will allow us to share our collection of modern and contemporary art.”
The garden’s history helps explain why the museum is betting on a comprehensive reset. The original design, completed in 1974 by the Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft, drew heavily on Japanese garden principles. Photographs document Bunshaft’s 1960 visit to Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto with his wife and the artist Isamu Noguchi, and his vision for the Hirshhorn was similarly spare: a white-pebbled expanse with little shade and limited seating.
By the late 1970s, however, the garden’s severity had become a liability in Washington’s summers. Chiu has noted that it was widely seen as “too hot” and “unwelcoming,” prompting changes over time, including added seating, shade, native trees and plants, and a ramp entrance. In 1981, landscape architect Lester Collins oversaw a redesign aimed at encouraging visitors to stay longer by introducing more trees and seating.
Even with those interventions, the garden’s audience remained modest relative to its location. Before closing for the current renovation in late 2023, it drew around 150,000 visitors annually, a small fraction of the roughly 35 million people who visit the National Mall each year. Chiu has described the renovation as a response to that imbalance, with the museum projecting that visitation will triple once the garden reopens.
The redesign is being framed as “mission-driven,” with practical changes intended to shift how the garden functions as public space. Plans include tripling the width of the entrance, improving accessibility through new pathways, and clearing sightlines that had become obscured. One of the most anticipated elements is the reopening of the underground passage connecting the garden to the museum plaza. Chiu has described the corridor as a “shimmering” environment, conceived to feel less like a utilitarian connector and more like an immersive artwork guiding visitors between the two sites.
Taken together, the new acquisitions and the architectural overhaul signal a recalibration of the Hirshhorn’s outdoor identity: a garden designed not only to display sculpture, but to hold bodies comfortably in time — and to meet the scale of the Mall with a space that finally invites people to stay.
