Curator’s Tour: Revolutions

FREE

Meet at the Welcome Desk in the Lobby

Hirshhorn curator Betsy Johnson will walk visitors through the exhibition Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960, which marks the Museum’s 50th-anniversary year and surveys one of the most revolutionary periods in art history.

About the Exhibition

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960 highlights works from the early half of the Museum’s collection. Working alongside new technologies, groundbreaking scientific discoveries, and rapidly expanding cities, while also responding to World Wars I and II, artists in Europe and North America invented dramatically novel approaches to art-making during this time. This period saw the development of abstraction in Western art, the increased use of nontraditional materials, and the rise of Conceptualism—the notion that the idea behind an artwork is more important than the art object itself. Many artists used their work to comment on social and political issues; others looked inward, making art that dealt with personal expression or the problems of form itself. Revolutions is primarily organized chronologically, but it also opens dialogues across history, with select contemporary artworks installed in conversation with modern masterworks to demonstrate how ideas and approaches formulated from 1860 to 1960 remain critical today.

If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks’ advance notice is recommended but not required.