The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is showing pieces they’ve recently added to their collection with Recent Acquisitions, a show that underscores the direction the museum is moving in terms of collecting, and draws attention to the work of the Contemporary Acquisitions Council (CAC). The CAC helped bring Radiant, a stand-out work by New York-based artist Alyson Shotz, to the museum.

Anne Ellegood, associate curator at the Hirshhorn, said that the museum launched the CAC in the fall of 2006 in order to focus on bringing works by emerging artists into the collection. Council members are primarily local collectors who have been invited to join, and they make financial contributions that are supplemented by the museums’ acquisitions budget. The CAC has spent about $100,000 at each of the three biannual meetings that have occurred so far.

The curators on staff select the works that the CAC considers — the works are actually brought to D.C. for meetings, and 50-80% are selected — and then the director approves their choices.

The CAC has added 26 new works by a wide range of artists from around the world in all mediums, including Damian Ortega (Mexico City and Berlin), Michael Bell Smith (NYC), Walid Raad (NYC and Beirut), Edgar Orlaineta (Mexico City), Mindy Shapero (LA), Mungo Thomson (LA), Gordon Cheung (London), Miranda Lichtenstein (NYC), Robin Rhode (Berlin), Gerard Byrne (Dublin) and Ivan Navarro (NYC).

Ellegood is responsible for bringing Radiant to the Hirshhorn – she’s known Shotz for many years, and did a studio visit about a year before acquiring the piece, to see which works would be good options for the museum. Ellegood saw Radiant in a group show called Written in Light, curated by Zeljka Himbele, in New York last spring. She fell in love with the piece, and knew it was the right one to propose to the CAC.

“I felt that Radiant encapsulated a lot of the concepts Alyson has been working with for many years—time, space, reflection, light—and also connected nicely to some of the minimal sculptures in the Hirshhorn collection,” Ellegood said, “The work seemed like a nice way to compare and contrast what a younger artist is doing with geometric, repeated forms to those before her like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt.”

When she brought the piece to the CAC meeting, council members echoed her thoughts.

“Because Radiant is very striking with its seductive surface, absorbing colors, and play with light, the group responded to the work right away,” Ellegood says, “It’s a beautiful piece, which gives it a lot of presence and makes it hard to resist visually, but I also think they understood it within an art historical context and appreciated how it inhabits space.”

Since museums can only display a fraction of their holdings at any given time, make sure to head down to the Hirshhorn before October when Recent Acquisitions closes and Radiant may be packed up.

The Hirshhorn is open daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and is located at Independence Ave. and 7th St., SW.

Alyson Shotz
Radiant, 2007
Museum purchase through the contributions of members of the Contemporary Acquisitions Council and the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund