National Gallery of Art Receives 1,261 Mitch Epstein Photographs in Landmark Gift
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has expanded its photography holdings with a substantial gift: 1,261 photographs by American artist Mitch Epstein (b. 1952), donated by Epstein and his wife, Susan Bell. The museum says the acquisition gives it the largest institutional collection of his work.
The donation spans Epstein’s five-decade career and brings together sets and portfolios from across his practice, from early street photographs and road-trip images made across the United States to later bodies of work such as A Language of New York and Family Business. It also includes large-scale prints from American Power, which examines the landscapes of power generation in the United States, and Property Rights, which documents sites of protest and resistance nationwide. Other series in the gift include New York Arbor, Rocks and Clouds, and Old Growth, each attentive to the presence of the natural world within urban settings.
Epstein, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and later at Cooper Union in New York, is based between Massachusetts and New York City. Over the past 50 years, he has built a practice that moves between documentary observation and more contemplative, large-format work. His early commitment to color photography was especially significant at a moment when black-and-white still dominated much of the fine art photography field. Encouraged by Garry Winogrand and inspired by William Eggleston, he developed a disciplined approach to composition and printmaking that helped widen the medium’s expressive range.
The museum’s director, Kaywin Feldman, said in a statement that Epstein’s work offers “a sweeping and visually compelling chronicle of the United States and beyond from the 1970s through the present.” She added that bringing the full breadth of his career into the collection would establish the National Gallery of Art as the leading institutional home for his work and ensure that future generations can study and reflect on it.
Epstein’s work has been widely exhibited, with solo presentations at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France in 2022, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas in 2021–22, Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna in 2017, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1994. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and the Prix Pictet in 2011. Several of the 11 large-scale photographs included in the gift will be shown in NGA exhibitions this year, extending the donation’s immediate public reach.
