HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

We just returned from a trip to see our daughter Michelle and her friend Tobias in Washington, D.C.  One of the places we visited while there was the Hirshhorn Museum.  The museum is on the south side of the National Mall just to the west of the National Air and Space Museum.  Both museums are part of the Smithsonian group and are entirely free to the public.  The Hirshhorn includes a sculpture garden that I will include in a subsequent post.  The artwork at the museum is essentially limited to modern and contemporary artists.  The building is in the form of a ring with an open central courtyard.  Here is a not very good photo of the front of the museum showing the courtyard.

Although it is barely visible in the above photo, the center of the courtyard is occupied by what looks like a fountain that is currently not in use.  An interesting aspect of it is that, while the fountain's overall structure is round, the central portion featured in the shot below is located off-center, more or less as shown in the photo.

And as long as I am describing its overall appearance, here is a shot of a portion of  the museum's ceiling.  I like the simplicity of this shot.

The interior of the museum is on three levels.  One of  the major exhibits in the lower level is by Barbara Kruger with the title "Belief and Doubt," for evident reasons.  Here are a few shots of that exhibit.

This entire saying (which I did not have a lens wide-angled enough to capture was "Belief + Doubt + Sanity."

Another impressive piece of art in the lower level was one by Ron Mueck formally untitled but informally titled "Big Man," again for evident reasons.  This was a full-sized, extremely lifelike representation of very heavy-set nude man.

Fortunately for any viewer, I did not include any full-frontal shots.  Here is a close-up of his face.  The detail is stunning.

The second level of the museum is currently dedicated to a special exhibit by Ai Weiwei, which I am including in a separate post.  The third level primarily houses the museum's permanent collection, which is very good.  Here is one of the sculptures from the collection.

Unfortunately, by the time we got to the third level our art museum tolerance was reaching its 24-hour limit, so we didn't spend as much time there as we could have.  We will just have to return another time and focus on that portion of the museum.

Taken with my Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 lens.