HIRSHHORN - Key Persons

Charline von Heyl (German, b. Mainz, 1960) studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and participated in the Cologne art scene in the 1980s before moving to New York in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions and is in collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Kunstmuseum Bonn. She was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014 and has been awarded residencies at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Chinati Foundation.

Daniel Sallick

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EMERITUS TRUSTEE

Donna Byrd

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Ek-Anong (Aey) Phanachet

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Ellen Susman

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Secretary of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Estrellita B. Brodsky

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Chairman of the BOARD of TRUSTEES
Museum Announces New Board Chair

Evelyn Hankins

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Senior Staff Member
Head Curator

Eytan Tigay

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

François Rochon

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Howard Wolfson

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Imani Greene

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Isaac "Yitz" Applbaum

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Isaac Lee

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Jerome L. Greene

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HONORARY TRUSTEE

John Vogelstein

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

John Wilkerson

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Joseph H. Hirshhorn

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EMERITUS TRUSTEE
Architecture

The Hirshhorn Museum's founding donor, Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899-1981), immigrated to New York from Latvia when he was eight years old. His widowed mother settled with her children (Joseph was the twelfth of thirteen) in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In time, Joseph Hirshhorn would become a financier, philanthropist, and well-known collector of modern art whose gift to the nation of nearly 6,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mixed media pieces established his namesake museum on the National Mall. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has been open to the public since October 4, 1974. At the age of thirteen, Hirshhorn left school to become a newsboy. Two years later he took his first salaried job, on Wall Street in Manhattan, earning $12 per week. At sixteen, he launched his career as a financier by using his savings of $255 to become a stockbroker. When he was eighteen, Hirshhorn acquired his first works of art: two etchings by the sixteenth-century German artist Albrecht Dürer, purchased for $75 each. This acquisition marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for collecting art, facilitated by an innate talent for making money. In the late 1940s, Hirshhorn's mining investments in uranium-rich Canadian land cemented his status as a wealthy man. Hirshhorn eventually turned his attention to the art of contemporary masters, becoming an avid collector of works by living painters such as Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Edward Hopper, Larry Rivers, and Raphael Soyer. He socialized with many of these artists and assisted them when he could. For example, Hirshhorn helped Willem de Kooning, a good friend, finance the construction of a Long Island studio in exchange for works of art. As a collector, Hirshhorn was also interested in works by American painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Thomas Eakins, Louis Eilshemius, Ashcan School artists, and first-wave modernists in touch with European developments. Hirshhorn was a frequent and welcome visitor in the studios of those whose works he collected, and many of these visits were commemorated with photographs. One such occasion was a 1966 visit to Pablo Picasso at Mas Notre Dame de Vie, near Mougins, in the south of France. The photographer Edward Steichen was a guest of Hirshhorn and his wife, Olga, at their house, Villa Lou Miradou, in Cap d'Antibes. Hirshhorn may be most well-known as a collector of nineteenth and twentieth-century sculpture. He acquired major works by pioneers such as Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi, as well as innovative contemporaries, including Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti. Developing friendships with these artists, Hirshhorn showed his enthusiasm in numerous ways, such as by visiting Moore's studio and enjoying the lively art scene with Giacometti. The breadth of Hirshhorn's sculpture collection was unknown to the general public until 1962, when selected works were loaned to the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a major exhibition. Several international museums and governments courted the intrepid collector, but he ultimately bequeathed his comprehensive modern art holdings to the Smithsonian Institution. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, played a supporting role by paying personal visits to the Hirshhorns. After an Act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1966, the Johnsons joined the Hirshhorns for the museum's groundbreaking in January 1969, just prior to the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon. The Horatio Alger Award, which commemorates determination, perseverance, and success in the face of adversity, was, appropriately, one of many honors with which Hirshhorn was recognized during his lifetime. Dividing his time between Washington, DC, and Naples, Florida, Hirshhorn remained a vigorous collector and patron of the arts until his death in 1981. His subsequent bequest to the museum nearly doubled the size of the collection. Today, building on this original foundation of artworks from Joseph Hirshhorn's personal collection, the museum's curators continue to refine and expand the collection. His generous donations of more than 12,000 works included permission to deaccession works through the authority of the Board of Trustees; and, all proceeds go into the acquisition funds for new works of art. A consistent influx of new acquisitions invigorates and extends Joseph Hirshhorn's legacy of passion for the art and artists of our time. To share Hirshhorn memories use #Hirshhorn. Visit our Museum and Sculpture Garden seven days a week.

Joshua Bernstein

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Judy Brown

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Director of Finance & Administration
Senior Staff Member

Juliana Curran Terian

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Kate Gibbs

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Director of Communications and Marketing
Senior Staff Member

Keith Rivers

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Ken Grossinger

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Keri Towler

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Senior Staff Member
Director, Collections Care and Management

Kevin Gover

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Smithsonian under Secretary for Museums and Culture

Kevin Hull

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Senior Staff Member
Director of Public Engagement

Lindsay Ellenbogen

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Liza Strelka

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Senior Staff Member
Manager of Exhibition & Curatorial Planning

Lonnie Bunch

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Smithsonian Secretary

Mahshid Ehsani

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Marcus Brauchli

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Mark Levitt

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Melissa Chiu

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Director
Senior Staff Member
Director of the Smithsonian 's Hirshhorn Museum
Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Melissa Chiu is director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern and contemporary art. Since her appointment in 2014, she has advocated for contemporary art through the Museum's exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programs. While maintaining the Hirshhorn's focus on 20th and 21st century art, the Museum has presented landmark exhibitions of work by some of today's most important artists, notably Shirin Neshat, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Laurie Anderson, and Charline von Heyl. Under Dr. Chiu's leadership, the Hirshhorn has also commissioned site-specific artworks that respond to the Museum's unique modern architecture, including Mark Bradford's longest-ever painting spanning 300 feet. Dr. Chiu has expanded the Museum's substantial holdings of European and American postwar art with examples of global modernism-works by artists Park Seo-bo, Jimmie Durham, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Senga Nengudi have been added to the collection. Under her leadership, the Hirshhorn welcomed over one million visitors in 2017-a major milestone marking its highest annual attendance in nearly 30 years and doubling its visitation from three years prior. Dr. Chiu's current organizational focus is transforming the Hirshhorn into a 21st century institution through the revitalization of the museum's campus including a new design for the Hirshhorn's Sculpture Garden by artist/architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. Another significant technology initiative by the Hirshhorn is the award-winning mobile video guide, Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), which uses image recognition of art works to offer instant videos of artists speaking about the creation of their work. This guide is now used by other Smithsonian museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of African Art. A native of Australia, Chiu earned her bachelor's degree in art history and criticism from the University of Western Sydney in 1992 and her master's degree in arts administration in 1994 from the University of New South Wales. She completed her Ph.D. with a dissertation on contemporary Chinese art at the University of Western Sydney in 2005. Chiu has authored and edited several books and catalogues on contemporary art, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 2010), and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Museum of Modern Art, and other universities and museums.

Olga Hirshhorn

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HONORARY TRUSTEE

Peggy Burnet

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EMERITUS TRUSTEE

Richard Powell

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Member of the BOARD of TRUSTEES

Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change, a major exhibition by one of the leading postwar American artists, ran from April 7 to September 5, 2016, at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It was the first museum survey devoted to Irwin's work from the pivotal decade of the 1960s, as well as the first US museum survey outside his native California since 1977. The Hirshhorn was the exhibition's only venue. A pioneer of California Light and Space art, Irwin (b. 1928) is also a leading figure in broader movements away from discrete art objects in traditional media and toward an understanding of art as a perceptual experience. The exhibition, whose title was drawn from the artist's writings, consisted of two parts. A historical survey chronicled the period from 1958 to 1970, during which Irwin moved from making small-scale abstract paintings to large acrylic discs and columns, before eventually abandoning working in a studio in favor of producing ephemeral installations of modest, unconventional materials, each made in response to the circumstances of a given site. The exhibition culminated in a major new commission in the Hirshhorn's galleries, where Irwin created an immersive installation in response to the museum's distinctive architecture using what has become his signature medium, scrim. "Robert Irwin is one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the definition of art in the second half of the 20th century," said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. "His new installation extends this vital legacy, engaging with the museum's architecture so that visitors experience our public spaces in new ways. The Hirshhorn is honored to introduce Irwin's intellectually rigorous and indescribably beautiful work to a new generation of viewers." "The 1960s is a crucial decade in the history of contemporary art, and Robert Irwin's investigations into the ways our perceptual processes are shaped and framed were at the forefront of the developments unfolding then," said Hirshhorn Curator Evelyn Hankins, who organized the exhibition. "The historical portion of the exhibition includes many rarely seen works that, because of their extremely subtle nature, demand in-person viewing. And as both these objects and the new installation demonstrate, Irwin's art becomes fully present only when you are standing in the physical space, experiencing it over an extended period of time." As the survey followed Irwin's inquiry into the nature and experience of art, it proceeded through each groundbreaking series of works from the period: the hand-held paintings, the pick-up sticks paintings, the early line paintings, the late line paintings, the dot paintings, the aluminum discs, the acrylic discs, and the acrylic columns. The expansive new installation that occupied the final gallery employed more than 100 feet of scrim to square architect Gordon Bunshaft's circle in one simple, conceptually elegant gesture. The exhibition was accompanied by a full-color scholarly catalogue, copublished with Prestel, that includes essays by Hankins, Irwin, Matthew Simms, Jennifer Licht Winkworth, and Susan Lake.