The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will reopen its renovated outdoor space this fall with three new monumental heads by Yoshitomo Nara, beginning an annual series of artist commissions on the museum’s West Lawn.
“Yoshitomo Nara: Sentinels of Stillness” is scheduled to run from Oct. 31, 2026, through Nov. 7, 2027, the Smithsonian announced Tuesday. The presentation will bring “Long Tall Peace Sister,” “Smiling” and “Tiny Bright Round Eyes,” all dated 2025, to the National Mall.
Each work enlarges a palm-sized clay head Nara made in 2021. The finished sculptures are fabricated in aluminum and coated in white urethane paint, translating the irregularity of hand-shaped clay into forms intended for an outdoor public setting.
Three works begin a recurring commission
Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu said the show will establish a yearly West Lawn exhibition by a leading international artist. Anne Reeve, a Hirshhorn curator, organized the first installment, which the museum says will include free tours and art education.
The announcement describes the three heads as evoking childhood snowdrifts and as emphasizing how daylight changes across their surfaces. Those are the museum’s and artist’s interpretive frames; visitors will not be able to evaluate the installed works until the garden opens.
The new series is separate from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. The first show has a defined closing date in November 2027, and the museum says a different commissioned artist will follow on the lawn each year.
The clay work grew from a turning point
Nara’s sculpture practice predates the new works by decades. He began making figurative wood carvings in the mid-1980s, later worked with fiber-reinforced plastic, lacquer and urethane, and developed his ceramic practice during a 2007 residency in Shigaraki, Japan.
According to the Hirshhorn, Nara turned more deeply to hand-molded clay after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster affected his home region. He conceived large-scale sculptural enlargements in 2020 and made the small heads behind the new trio the following year.
The museum’s account is biographical, not a claim that the new works document the disaster. The announced sculptures are presented as contemporary public art shaped by material process, memory and scale.
A reopened route through the garden
The sculpture garden closed for renovation in 2023. Its redesign by Hiroshi Sugimoto received approvals from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission in 2022 after public consultation.
The Smithsonian says the reopening will add an expanded entrance from the National Mall and refresh the passage connecting the garden with the museum building and plaza. Those access changes matter because the original 1974 sunken design could be difficult to enter and navigate.
The museum has not attached a separate ticket price to the exhibition. The Hirshhorn’s public programs and galleries are free, although operating details can change before the Oct. 31 opening.
For now, the firm facts are the artists, titles, dates, materials and planned series. The appearance of the completed installation, its relationship to the redesigned lawn and the visitor experience remain future-facing until the site reopens.