“Studio Hirshhorn” Videos Invite Art Lovers Behind the Scenes before Major Art Exhibitions
August 19, 2024
“Studio Hirshhorn” Videos Invite Art Lovers Behind the Scenes before Major Art Exhibitions on the National Mall
YouTube Series Launches with Nine Shorts Made in Partnership with OSGEMEOS Ahead of Artists’ Largest US Museum Survey, Opening Sept. 29
The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has launched a first-of-its-kind video series, “Studio Hirshhorn,” inviting viewers behind the scenes from the earliest planning of an exhibition to the big reveal in the Museum. In keeping with the Museum’s ethos of radical accessibility, the shorts reveal the genesis of a major exhibition, inviting broad audiences to learn about the artists and their art through the exhibition-making processes.
Sharing “the work behind the work,” Studio Hirshhorn kicks off with a series featuring OSGEMEOS in their São Paulo, Brazil, studio preparing for Endless Story, their largest US museum survey, which opens Sept. 29. The nine “Studio Hirshhorn: OSGEMEOS” videos will be integrated into the Museum’s social media storytelling, exhibition design, and accompanying book using Hirshhorn Eye, the Museum’s award-winning smartphone guide.
“For the public, how exhibitions get made is a mystery,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “We want our audiences to see that there are years of planning and creative collaboration between artists and curators to create a great exhibition,” she said. “Studio Hirshhorn lifts the veil so viewers get closer to the process and can be inspired by it.”
This mission-critical platform builds on 50 years of free public programming, including notable recent initiatives such as “Artists in Quarantine” videos, chronicling artists in their studios during the pandemic shutdown, and our TV series The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, with Smithsonian Channel and MTV, currently streaming on Paramount Plus.
“Studio Hirshhorn x OSGEMEOS” was made in partnership with artists Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974), known globally as OSGEMEOS. In less than two minutes, each short reveals one facet of the traditionally hidden process that contemporary artists and their museum partners share in advance of an exhibition. The debut introduces OSGEMEOS, their scale model of the Hirshhorn’s circular galleries, and themes central to their practice, including music, graffiti, and outer space, in their own words. Watched collectively, in any order, the series outlines museum-making.
OSGEMEOS: Endless Story is curated by Marina Isgro, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, with the support of Curatorial Assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera.
The exhibition is accompanied by the first major English-language book on OSGEMEOS’s work, copublished by Rizzoli. The fully illustrated 344-page catalogue features nearly 350 full-color illustrations as well as original contributions by Isgro, Alan Ket, Peter Michalski, and Marguerite Itamar Harrison, plus interviews with the artists by Jochen Volz and Melissa Chiu. The Hirshhorn is grateful to Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London, for its support of the book.
The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are supported by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the additional support of Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Major support for the exhibition has been provided by Marc and Lynne Benioff and the Teplitzky Family, Thailand. Additional funding has been provided by Mike and Sue Rushmore, the Hirshhorn International Council, and the Hirshhorn Collectors’ Council. Exhibition programming received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino.
To access Studio Hirshhorn videos featuring OSGEMEOS, visit the exhibition’s website or the Museum’s YouTube channel.
About OSGEMEOS
OSGEMEOS (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974; live and work in São Paulo), whose name means “the twins” in Portuguese, are a collaborative art duo composed of twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo. As children, the brothers developed a distinct way of communicating through artistic language, but it was with the introduction of hp-hop culture in the 1980s that OSGEMEOS began to use art as a way to share their dynamic and magical universe with the public. Combining historical and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture with graffiti, hip-hop, music, dreams, and international culture, the artists have created an expansive body of work that includes murals, paintings, sculpture, site-specific installations, and video. They use a symbolic visual language often inspired by the dreams that, as twins, they claim to share. In addition to their use of bright colors and elaborate patterns, they are best known for their paintings featuring long-limbed figures with thin outlines, enlarged faces, and simplified features. The use of doors, canvases, and mirrors, both literal—they paint directly onto discarded doors and incorporate reflective surfaces into their works—and as motifs, signal access to another realm or an entry point to the psyche, pulling viewers into their surreal and chimerical world.
About the Hirshhorn
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all. The Hirshhorn Museum is open daily, 10 AM–5:30 PM (except Dec. 25). For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu. Follow the Museum on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Image: Studio Hirshhorn logo; still from Studio Hirshhorn: OSGEMEOS on Tritrez. Courtesy of Hirshhorn. Filmed by Colé Vinicius
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