Women's Lifestyle October 30, 2026 0 Comments

Unlock the Hidden Power of America’s New Sculpture Garden: A Bold Fusion of Art, Culture, and Unstoppable Energy

Ever wonder how a city’s soul gets reshaped right before our eyes—sometimes with freshly poured concrete, symbolic pavilions, and bold new sculpture gardens? Well, Washington, D.C.’s National Mall isn’t just about dazzling monuments and historic echoes these days. It’s become a live canvas where visions of America’s past, present, and future intersect, sparking debates on artistry, identity, and national memory. From Uzbekistan’s traditional aywans making unexpected appearances near Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, to a radical overhaul of the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden by Hiroshi Sugimoto, this evolving landscape challenges us to think differently about public art. It’s a story that blends history, controversy, and creative reinvention—asking, what really defines the cultural heartbeat of a nation? Dive in as we unpack these provocations, because in D.C., even a concrete slab can ignite a conversation. LEARN MORE

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In Washington, D.C., in early September, in West Potomac Park just off the National Mall, workers in a fenced-off section of an athletic field were seen smoothing freshly poured concrete. They were preparing, it turned out, for the installation of two aywans—traditional Uzbek open-sided pavilions, with elaborately carved wooden columns and roofs. The pavilions were a gift from Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, to President Trump and the American people, presented as a symbol of “friendship and strategic partnership” between the countries amid ongoing trade negotiations and to mark America’s 250th anniversary this year.

The aywans were being installed at the site Trump has designated for his proposed National Garden of American Heroes, a park featuring 250 life-size statues of notable Americans. (In addition to past presidents and political figures, Mark Twain, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Julia Child, Kobe Bryant, and curiously, the late Canadian-born longtime host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek, were among the early names floated.) The federal call for artists specified that the statues in the garden would be realistic and classical, and be made from traditional materials like marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass. The development is also envisioned to include reflecting pools, plazas, cafés, and an amphitheater.

The National Garden of Heroes remains, officially, a preliminary concept still subject to federal review, with questions over congressional authorization looming—although Uzbekistan’s ambassador has said that the aywans will become part of it.

But in Washington, D.C., a city built on symbolism, the distinction between what is planned and what is already taking shape can be a slippery one. The capital—and the Mall in particular—has always been a place where ideas about what America is and represents are writ especially large. The monuments, memorials, protests, performances, celebrations, and public art have all helped define what we choose to commemorate, project, and remember. As the Trump administration undertakes its own recasting of those civic spaces—from the “American Flag Blue” resurfacing of the Reflecting Pool to the proposed 250-foot arch—the landscape is one where competing visions of America are continuing to be made manifest, often in real time.

Two people posed outdoors in front of a stone wall and modern building, with construction materials in the background.

Photo by Greg Kahn. Courtesy: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Former Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden director Melissa Chiu and artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto in the East Garden while it was still under construction this past March.

A little over a mile northeast of where the aywans were being installed, on the Mall itself, another kind of garden was taking shape. At the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian’s national museum of modern and contemporary art, the finishing touches were being put on a four-year transformation of the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden, which has been redesigned by the Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The project was the culmination of now former Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu’s 12-year tenure leading the museum; in September, she left to become director of the Guggenheim in New York. When the garden opens on October 31, it will bring together nearly 60 works spanning more than a century of sculpture, from pieces in founder Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s collection to recent acquisitions and commissions by a diverse range of artists working today. But the garden is also in many ways a distillation of some of the more essential questions that Chiu sought to address during her time at the museum—chiefly around who contemporary art is for, what gets represented in the collection, and how to think about the remit of a national museum in a country as vast and diverse as the United States.

“I do think there is a kind of RESPONSIBILITY that we hold to our PUBLIC given that we are that kind of public INSTITUTION on the NATIONAL MALL,” Chiu said. “It’s a DIFFERENT way of being in the WORLD.”

In 1939, Congress called for a museum of contemporary art in Washington, D.C., to complement the more classical National Gallery of Art. The idea was eventually realized in the 1960s, when Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley persuaded financier and philanthropist Joseph H. Hirshhorn, a Latvian-born Jewish immigrant who had amassed a significant collection of modern art, to donate his collection. Hirshhorn was particularly interested in 19^th– and early 20^th-century sculpture, owning major works by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore, while also collecting the work of then-living American artists like Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Edward Hopper, and Larry Rivers. An Act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1966, and it opened on the Mall in 1974.

Designed by Gordon Bunshaft, the museum was conceived as a piece of sculpture itself—a monumental, elevated concrete cylinder with a sunken garden that broke sharply with the neoclassical architecture of the other institutions around it. Its holdings have since grown to more than 12,000 works, but its mandate remained distinctly forward-looking: to serve as a national museum for the art and artists of its own time.

Outdoor sculpture garden with trees, pathways, and modern art pieces under a clear blue sky.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

A view of Sugimoto’s redesigned garden from the museum’s South Overlook.

I spoke with Chiu in late August, as she wound down her time at the Hirshhorn. Washington, D.C., was in the throes of preparing for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the IndyCar street race to mark the country’s 250th-anniversary celebrations. (The White House, which worked to clear the way for the race via executive order, described it as an event designed to “showcase the majesty” of Washington and its national monuments.) In the days leading up to the race, the area around the Mall was being transformed into a temporary racetrack: streets were closed, barricades were erected, and increased security disrupted traffic flow through the city. At one point during our conversation, Chiu had to step away to take a call because someone she was expecting was having trouble getting to the museum amid all the obstructions.

The brief interruption offered another D.C.-sized metaphor. The Australia-born Chiu, who spent 13 years at Asia Society in New York before coming to the Hirshhorn in 2014, arrived thinking about what it meant for the institution to be not simply another museum of modern and contemporary art, but a national museum dedicated to that work.

The museum came to refer to its approach as “radical accessibility”; Chiu said the idea was ultimately about more than making contemporary art easier to understand. “We described it much later and articulated it as being artist-centric,” she said. If a visitor was confronted with a seemingly difficult or complex work, the question was how best to help that person appreciate it. “It was really actually the artist,” she said, rather than “an abstracted art-historical explanation.”

Colorful sculpture resembling a large rounded doorframe with a vibrant turquoise interior against a cloudy sky.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Elmgreen & Dragset’s Eight (2026).

That meant reducing the physical and intellectual barriers that might stand between visitors and the artist whose work they were seeing and rethinking everything from the tone of the wall texts and educational materials to the museum’s voice, as well as developing Hirshhorn Eye, a mobile guide that allows visitors to listen to artists talk about their own work. It also meant finding ways to extend the museum’s reach beyond its own walls, through digital projects, video, and even television. (The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a six-part competition series, aired on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel in 2023).

The Hirshhorn’s audience is unusually broad for a museum of contemporary art. Because it is free and sits on the Mall, many visitors arrive with little expectation that they are viewing one of the country’s most important collections of modern and contemporary art. Some may be encountering that kind of work for the first time.

“I do think there is a kind of responsibility that we hold to our public given that we are that kind of public institution on the National Mall,” Chiu said. “It’s a different way of being in the world, I think,” she explains. “We tried to be less institutional, less formal.”

The Hirshhorn’s original collection, Chiu said, represented “the absolute canon of sculpture in the 20^th century.” But canons today can represent a lot of different things to different people. Chiu’s goal was to ensure that a museum founded to reflect the present truly reflected the way artists now work across disciplines, using new technologies and materials, drawing on different traditions and histories, popular culture, and their own individual backgrounds and experiences. During her tenure, the Hirshhorn mounted major surveys of artists such as Shirin Neshat, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Laurie Anderson, and Charline von Heyl. Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” show, in particular, became a phenomenon, helping to propel the museum’s annual attendance past one million in 2017.

Sculpture garden featuring various sculptures surrounded by trees and stone walls under a clear blue sky.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The view from the revitalized East Garden, with Barbara Hepworth’s Curved Form: Bryher II (1961), Aristide Maillol’s Nymph (Central Figure for “The Three Nymphs”)(1930/cast by 1953), Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman, (1932/cast 1981), Henri Laurens’s Maternity, 1932, and Henri Matisse’s The Back I-IV (1916-1917/cast 1959-1960).

The new sculpture garden is perhaps the clearest expression of that project. Major works from the original collection will return, including Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais and Monument to Balzac, Matisse’s complete series of The Backs I–IV, and works by Moore, Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, David Smith, and Lucio Fontana. They will be joined by recent acquisitions and commissions that substantially widen the geographical and cultural frame by artists like Lauren Halsey, Raven Halfmoon, Mark Grotjahn, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Izumi Kato, Pedro Reyes, and Chatchai Puipia. Among them: Halfmoon’s Dancing at Dusk, which draws on Caddo traditions and contemporary Native life; Halsey’s keepers of the krown (antoinette grace halsey), a monumental column topped with a portrait of her grandmother; Kato’s Untitled, which transforms stones sourced in Japan into an otherworldly aluminum figure; Puipia’s Wish You Were Here, a reclining bronze wrapped in a traditional Thai pha khao ma cloth; and Pedro Reyes’s Tonatiuh, carved from volcanic stone and connected to pre-Columbian and Modernist Mexican traditions.

“ARCHITECTURE must reflect the SPIRIT of the AGE in which it was BUILT,” Sugimoto explained. “That is what makes a GREAT work of architecture ENDURE in HISTORY.”

The garden will also feature KAWS’s SHELTER, a 14-foot bronze depicting two of his familiar COMPANION figures as parent and child; Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, D.C., which invites visitors to leave behind handwritten wishes for peace; and Elmgreen & Dragset’s Eight, a 28-foot-tall vertical swimming pool complete with diving board, ladder, and lights. On the West Lawn, Yoshitomo Nara will inaugurate a new series of commissions with Long Tall Peace Sister, Smiling, and Tiny Bright Round Eyes, three monumental white heads derived from small clay sculptures he made in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The original garden, designed by Bunshaft, was spare, recessed, and largely devoid of shade or greenery. Bunshaft had emulated the Zen gardens he visited in Japan, creating an austere setting in which the sculptures could stand apart from their surroundings. But it wasn’t exactly welcoming. Visitors entering from the Mall had to descend a flight of stairs, only to encounter a 10-foot concrete wall. Within a decade, landscape architect Lester Collins was brought in to soften the space, adding canopy trees, more vegetation, additional seating, and a ramp. But by the 2010s the garden was also contending with deteriorating infrastructure and leaks in the passageway that connected it to the museum plaza. More fundamentally, it had become increasingly ill-equipped for the scale and variety of work the museum was presenting.

A tall sculpture featuring faces and crosses, set against a stone wall backdrop.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Raven Halfmoon’s Dancing at Dusk (2024).

To remake it, Chiu turned to Sugimoto, who already had a long relationship with the Hirshhorn, which presented a survey of his work in 2006. They had already collaborated on a redesign of the museum’s lobby, unveiled in 2018, which sought to work with Bunshaft’s architecture rather than overwrite it.

Sugimoto approached the garden as a place for people to engage with art rather than simply an architectural intervention. He widened its entrance and brought it up to the same grade as the Mall. He created long sightlines and a sequence of open and intimate spaces defined by a series of dry-stacked stone walls constructed from roughly 950 tons of stone. He also reopened the passageway connecting the garden to the museum plaza, transforming it into a sculptural tunnel.

Sugimoto said his goal was to work in dialogue with Bunshaft’s original design rather than erase it. “Architecture must reflect the spirit of the age in which it was built,” he explained. “That is what makes a great work of architecture endure in history.” His aim was to revive and expand some of the original ideas behind Bunshaft’s garden by looking backward as well as forward. “In considering what backdrop would best suit the viewing of modern sculpture,” he said, “I concluded that it should be a pre-modern one.”

A serene outdoor space featuring a reflecting pool, modern architecture, and vibrant autumn foliage.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Central Galleries and pool.

He also reinterpreted the Japanese karesansui, or dry landscape garden, where minimalist arrangements of rocks and raked gravel evoke mountains and water. “It is expressed as a void within space, suggesting presence through absence,” he explained. “Rather than flaunting monumentality through size or height, I intended a serene space that sits quietly buried within its environment.”

The works on the West Lawn will change annually, while performances, educational programs, and other activities keep the space in motion. “It really is an invitation,” Chiu said of the redesign. “It’s an invitation to come inside.” The wider entrance from the Mall and the at-grade approach are a big part of that, allowing visitors to enter more easily and establishing a different relationship between the art and the audience. “Lauren Halsey’s grandmother will be at eye level with them now.”

The garden is a distillation of what Chiu said she tried to do throughout her time at the Hirshhorn: preserve the museum’s inheritance while expanding the definition of who, what, and whose histories belong in the collection—and, more broadly, what it means to be a national museum of contemporary art in a country like the United States

That question has taken on a new kind of urgency amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to influence the way the Smithsonian institutions present American history and culture. Over the last year and a half, the administration has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal funding and other forms of government support over what it considers ideologically slanted material. This past summer, the White House released a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism” and objecting to what it characterized as a presentation of the country through “regret, tragedy, and shame.” Officials were directed to install temporary signs outside the museum warning visitors about what the administration deemed “inaccurate information” about American history.

Abstract multi-colored stone sculpture resembling a stylized face and body set against a rustic stone wall.

Photo: Rick Coulby. Courtesey: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Izumi Kato’s Untitled (2026).

In September, Trump called for the Smithsonian to install an 11-foot statue of George Washington in the National Museum of American History’s Flag Hall and, more strikingly, to replace Infinity, a 1967 abstract sculpture by José de Rivera outside the museum, with a 30-foot statue of Washington. He also called for a five-year exhibition devoted to Washington leading up to the 300th anniversary of his birth in 2032. “Replace a sculpture that says nothing about America with the man who, more than anyone else, says everything about America,” Trump posted on Truth Social (on September 11). Infinity is often said to be the first contemporary sculpture permanently installed on the Mall and, at the time, was the largest piece of contemporary sculpture ever commissioned by the federal government.

Earlier that month, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III announced he would retire at the end of the year after nearly four decades at the institution and seven years as secretary. Bunch said his decision was not related to the pressure from the administration, but his departure comes as the Smithsonian is navigating an increasingly public debate over its independence and authority.

Chiu, who I spoke with before Bunch’s announcement, was careful not to characterize the moment simply as an attack on museums, but part of a larger shift in the relationship between museums and the public. “I would say that over my tenure, I’ve seen different groups provide feedback on what they think museums should be doing and what they think museums should be showing, and that feedback is much more visible today, because a visitor can leave a message in the comments or post on social media,” she said. “Before, there was no feedback loop, no feedback mechanism, so I’d say that that has been going on for close to the last decade, actually—and yes, the past 18 months, it’s been a different kind of feedback loop that is very much about how Smithsonian museums present American history.”

She did not see that heightened scrutiny simply as a threat. “The fact that people care enough to voice concern and commitment about what their museums are doing, how they’re presenting the artifacts or artworks, shows that it matters,” she said.

A woman in a black dress stands confidently on a wooden floor in a spacious, well-lit interior.

Photo: Greg Kahn. Courtesy: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

I asked Chiu if the responsibility she referred to earlier was different for a national museum in a country as vast and diverse as the U.S. than for a private one. “I think that if you’re a public museum, you receive funding from public entities and from the government, and so with that, there are certain responsibilities,” she said. “One of them is that we’re free. Another is that we’re open every day but one throughout the entire year. And then the other, at least in the way that we think about it at the Hirshhorn, is that we are representative of different views by artists.”

In Washington, D.C., public sculpture has traditionally been used to declare, to commemorate, to fix history in place. The Hirshhorn’s new garden, Chiu suggested, reflects a country whose cultural history has never belonged to a single tradition. “I think perhaps here in America, more than anywhere else, this has been a country of many stories,” she told me. “I see what we’ve done in the sculpture garden as being representative of this country, that it was always one that welcomed artists from everywhere.”

As the Hirshhorn’s new sculpture garden prepares to open this weekend just days ahead of the midterm elections on November 3, the landscape around it continues to evolve. Last week, the National Park Service unveiled a revised plan for the Tidal Basin and West Potomac Park that includes a new Great Lawn and Oval Park near the site that has been proposed for the National Garden of American Heroes. The garden itself is not part of the Park Service’s current plan, officials said, but preservationists immediately questioned whether the new configuration could ultimately make room for it.

I asked Chiu what she hoped to find when she returned to the Hirshhorn. “The best possible thing as a museum director that you can see is people,” she said. “Just people enjoying art.”