Though it’s a slow time for D.C. museums right now, with many exhibits seeing their final days and new ones opening in February, it’s still possible to see some new art, and art that’s here to stay — the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has filled its lower galleries with Currents: Recent Acquisitions, pieces that have been acquired by the museum since 2004.

Curated by Anne Ellegood, Recent Acquisitions draws attention to museums’ collecting practices. Many of the works on display were acquired by the Hirshhorn’s Contemporary Acquisitions Council (CAC), a group that secures works for the permanent collection from up-and-coming artists. The CAC began collecting in fall 2006, and since then they have added 22 pieces, including by artists from the United States (including D.C.), Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Lebanon and Germany.

The highlight of the newly acquired works is Radiant, a sculpture of aluminum, laminated with acrylic with a diachronic film, by American artist Alyson Shotz. Radiant reflects objects in the room around it, drawing images in and distorting them, which presents us with a useful way of looking at the whole exhibition. Each work of art in the gallery was acquired during a short window of time, and like John Baldessari’s painting Exhibiting Paintings, also on display, states, “it is a good idea to have your paintings shown with those of others, it gives you a fresh perspective on your work, because it is surprising how different your pictures look on the wall surrounding paintings of other artists…” The art in Recent Acquisitions works together to present a snapshot of the contemporary ideals and interests of the Hirshhorn.

Showcasing recently acquired works isn’t as compelling as a thematic exhibit, but it’s still notable. The Phillips Collection will be doing something similar with its upcoming Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects, which will display 100 works newly-added to the museum. These kind of exhibits give museum-goers useful information — it’s a chance to see works that are part of the permanent collection before they either lose prominence amidst traveling exhibitions or are put into storage due to lack of gallery wall-space, and it also highlights the direction the museum is going in terms of collecting. Recent Acquisitions at the Hirshhorn is heavy on photography and sculpture, suggesting that those mediums are of greatest interest to Hirshhorn curators and the CAC.

Also of note are 10 of Lee Friedlander’s series of 52 gelatin silver prints from The Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden, photographs taken of the building and garden soon after the museum opened. D.C.-based artists Linn Meyers and Mary Coble and D.C.-born Iona Rozeal Brown are also represented.

Not part of Recent Acquisitions, but also on the lower level of the Hirshhorn is the Black Box theater, which features a short film by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander — 2006’s Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue, Portuguese for Ash Wednesday. The 5 minute and 48 second film is a collaboration with artist Cao Guimarães, and shows ants dragging colorful pieces of confetti from a Carnival celebration back to their colony.

The film is quirky, with the ants “cleaning up” after the humans’ party — they haul the shiny debris through the woods, sometimes fighting each other for the pieces. At the end the ants pull the discs down into the earth — though Neuenschwander doesn’t show us what the ants use them for, we can imagine that they’re using them for the same aesthetic purpose that the humans are. The film takes objects outside of their typical context, and the combination and ants and confetti comments on the relationship between humans and nature, and the beauty in the everyday.

Recent Acquisitions is on display through October 1, and Rivane Neuenschwander is in the Black Box through April 20. The Hirshhorn is open daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and is located at Independence Ave. and 7th St., SW.

Miranda Lichtenstein, Floater, 2004 in Recent Acquisitions
Image courtesy the museum web site.