Look who’s back in time for fall! Yayoi Kusama’s “Pumpkin” (2016) is now on view outside in the Hirshhorn Plaza. Kusama’s lifelong interest in pumpkins was sparked by a childhood trip to a seed-harvesting ground with her grandfather - but will her “Pumpkin” spark yours? 🟠 The Hirshhorn Plaza is open daily to all, 10AM-5:30PM. Now with way, way more polka-dots. — Video credit: Yayoi Kusama’s “Pumpkin” (2016) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Fiber-reinforced plastic. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts © YAYOI KUSAMA. Video by @Hirshhorn. [Video description: A quick pan up from lush grass and clovers to a giant yellow pumpkin covered in black polka-dots of varying sizes that accentuate the pumpkin’s organic grooves.]

Who needs feet and inches when we have Mark Bradford and you? Mark Bradford's monumental "Pickett's Charge" (2017) measures 12 feet tall and 400 feet long, or 1.8 Mark Bradfords tall and 60 sideways Mark Bradfords long. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this commission is one of his largest works to date. Now, how do we measure these eight abstract paintings using you? Share your height in the comments and we'll let you know. Then, measure up in person at the Hirshhorn and share the results (and pics) with us using #Hirshhorn. --- Image credit: Mark Bradford at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with details of "Pickett’s Charge," 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Cathy Carver. [Image description: Mark Bradford wears all white and stands on a stepladder, looking toward the viewer. Beside and behind him, a wall covered floor-to-ceiling with dozens of striated layers of colorful, torn paper stretches and curves away, endlessly.]

Sound on for frogs. Now, imagine those frog calls diced, looped, stretched, and playing across eight speakers around the Hirshhorn Plaza. Don’t just imagine though - tomorrow, Sat. Sept. 9, 1-4PM, bask in a free, immersive sound environment created by Matmos. The innovative electronic music duo has reimagined the sounds of @SmithsonianFolkways’ catalog for #Folkways75, including recordings of junkyards, frogs, medical wonders, and more. Sample their audio alchemy live in the Hirshhorn Plaza, and check out their forthcoming album, “Return to Archive.” 🎶 Hop over tomorrow for @xmatmosx’s performance. Link in bio to learn more. — Video credit: Video courtesy of @Hirshhorn. Audio courtesy of @SmithsonianFolkways. [Video description: Gentle pans over the circular, concrete Hirshhorn Plaza beneath a blue sky, with the sound of croaking frogs.]

Talk about ahead of the curve. "A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China" showcases the work of leading multigenerational Chinese artists. The exhibition explores how emerging Chinese artists working in photography, recorded performance art, and video art shifted their focus toward individual self-expression between the 1990s and 2020s. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1997 publication by artists Rong Rong and Liu Zheng that celebrated the possibilities in moving the practice of photography away from realism toward a conceptual art practice. 📷 Get ahead too: "A Window Suddenly Opens" is currently on view, only at the Hirshhorn. --- Image credit: "A Window Suddenly Opens"; 04 November to 2022 to 07 January 2024; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. [Image description: A lone person stands in an enormous, curved gallery space with a couple benches, surrounded by dozens of artworks, mostly photographs, hanging on the walls. One sweeping blue wall features large black-and-white photographs, while the other white walls feature large color photographs.]

Grab some cloud cover this week: At the entrance to the exhibition "John Akomfrah: Purple," a cloud of plastic bottles looms overhead. Together, the hundreds of bottles create a shape that conjures, in the artist's words, a "toxic cloud." The deep purple walls and carpeting of the gallery continue past the cloud, leading to the main attraction - John Akomfrah's "Purple" (2017), a monumental video installation reflecting on climate change and justice across six immersive screens. ☁️ Escape the sun and take a break in "John Akomfrah: Purple," only at the Hirshhorn. --- Image credit: @d.alien11 [Image description: An adult wearing casual clothing stands in a deep purple room, raising a hand and their gaze up to a massive cloud of hanging plastic bottles that covers the entire ceiling. The room is dim, lit softly by lights filtering in from behind the bottles.]

“It's less like an object and more like the weather because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are, but in the weather it's impossible to say when something begins or ends.” –John Cage, born on this day in 1912 An adventurous composer, music theorist, writer, and conceptual artist, John Cage was fascinated with sound and listening as a fundamental aspect of social and spiritual life. His innovative ideas on indeterminacy in music—composition guided by freedom, curiosity, and chance—expanded the minds of generations of artists and paved the way for various creative communities that would follow. This approach is central to Cage’s landmark work, "Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music," released on Folkways Records in 1959. In this work, Cage reads 90 one-minute stories, his speed determined by the story’s length, while in a separate room, pianist David Tudor performs selected works from across Cage’s oeuvre. In this distinctive pairing of prose and sound, there is no definite beginning or end. Following the album’s release, Folkways, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, became a home for numerous avant-garde musicians and sound artists. Cage’s quote above, a comment on his longtime collaboration with Merce Cunningham, is one of the hand-painted reflections in Laurie Anderson’s monumental "Four Talks" (2021), currently on view at the Hirshhorn. The installation was the centerpiece of her recent solo exhibition, "The Weather" (2021-2022), which was dedicated to Cage and Anderson's late husband, the musician Lou Reed. Link in bio to learn more about John Cage and #Folkways75. --- Artwork credit: Detail view of Laurie Anderson's "Four Talks" (2021) at the @Hirshhorn. Courtesy of the artist.

FINAL DAYS: "Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection" closes Sept. 4. That gives you only three more days to explore this full-floor exhibition, which unites almost a century of work across media by 50 women and gender-nonconforming artists. Among these artists are the @GuerrillaGirls, whose larger-than-life works fill the walls of an entire gallery. Since 1985, this anonymous group of activist feminist artists have staged public interventions and acts of resistance - all while wearing gorilla masks. They are best known for their poster campaigns, which use bold graphics, thoroughly researched data, and humor to expose corruption, gender and ethnic inequalities, and class biases in art, pop culture, and politics. 🎨 (Re)Visit and bid farewell to "Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection" through this Monday, Sept. 4, only at the Hirshhorn. --- Image credits in the comments.

Wake up the babes, new Hirshhorn Kids programs just dropped. Hirshhorn Kids programming is returning after our August nap, starting with Art Cart this Saturday, Sept. 2, 10AM-1PM. Get hands-on with a morning of colorful activities and art-making inspired by Rachel Jones's abstract painting "SMIIILLLLEEEE" (2021). Then, check out the work for yourself (hands-off, please) in the exhibition "Put It This Way," on view through Monday, Sept. 4. 🌈 Roll up to Art Cart on Saturdays, 10AM-1PM, and return on Wednesdays, 10-11AM, for Storytime; both free. Link in bio to learn more. --- Image courtesy of @Hirshhorn. Photo by Rick Coulby. [Image description: A group of children and their adult caretakers gather round a gray rug as a Hirshhorn educator stands in front of them, reading a picture book. They sit with rapt attention and smiles outside in the shady Hirshhorn plaza.]

Lois Mailou Jones was a hugely influential presence in the late-20th-century artistic community of Washington, DC, where she taught at Howard University for 47 years alongside her own artistic practice. Having studied in Paris in the 1930s, Jones is best known for paintings that blend a Modernist approach with an interest in the histories and cultures of Black American life and that of the African diasporas. For a time in the 1960s, Jones also explored politically charged collage. "Challenge—America" (1964) reflects her preoccupations during the tumultuous year of its creation, as the United States grappled with the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the fight for racial equality. ✂️ FIVE DAYS LEFT: Encounter Lois Mailou Jones's work in "Put It This Way," only at the @Hirshhorn through Mon, Sept. 4. --- Image credit: Lois Mailou Jones, "Challenge—America," 1964. Collage of printed papers and paint on canvas. Museum Purchase, 1977. Courtesy of @Hirshhorn. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. [Image description: Images of well-known and anonymous figures jostle with newspaper headlines and snippets of text in a dynamic collage. Some of the prominent features are 'America' in large text and 'Mississippi,' the Lincoln Memorial, and phot of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John F. Kennedy.]

Canoes and elephants and chairs, oh my! Painted in a stream-of-consciousness manner, @LaurieAndersonOfficial's immersive "Four Talks" (2021) features wall-to-wall stories, song lyrics, quotations, jokes, and commentary on current events. Not to mention vivid imagery, four unique sculptures, and audio. Everywhere you turn, there's something new and intriguing - whether that's a talking parrot sculpture, a hand-painted musing, rattling ceramic cups, or all of the above and more. 🐘 Find what speaks to you (sometimes literally) in Laurie Anderson's "Four Talks," only at the Hirshhorn. --- Image credit: Photo in Laurie Anderson's "Four Talks" (2021) by @SamanthaThomps. [Image description: A person stands, smiling, in the corner of a black room filled with white paintings and handwriting. The images include elephants, a chair, and a canoe in the woods, and the phrases include 'Books are the way the dead to to the living' and 'A diamond in your mind - Tom Waits.']

Sondra Perry creates media installations addressing Black history and identity in digital worlds. In “Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation” (2016), a video plays across three screens mounted on an exercise bicycle. An animated avatar modeled after Perry delivers a monologue addressing the persistence of racism and sexism even in the supposedly disembodied virtual realm; as she speaks, she periodically glitches and crashes. Viewers who sit on the bike and turn its pedals find that their own strenuous but unproductive physical labor resonates with the avatar’s ruminations. 🚲 Bike and connect with Sondra Perry in the current exhibition “Put It This Way,” only at the Hirshhorn for one more week, through Mon, Sept. 4. — Image credits and video description in the comments.

Lights, Holzer, action: Jenny Holzer's "THE PEOPLE" (2023) will make its debut on the National Mall, Sept. 17–21. The monumental text-based projection will illuminate the Mall-facing exteriors of the Hirshhorn and @AmHistoryMuseum nightly, from dusk through 11PM, with quotations that reflect on democracy. The artwork, created by @JennyHolzerStudio for the 60th anniversary of @ArtInEmbassies, also heralds the arrival of Art in Embassies' traveling exhibition, "A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time" at the National Museum of American History, on view Sept. 19–Oct. 20. 💡 Turn up when it turns on: Link in bio to learn more about "Jenny Holzer, THE PEOPLE." --- Image credit: Portrait of Jenny Holzer. Courtesy of U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies. Photo by Nanda Lanfranco.