Museum
Hirshhorn Museum
Concrete Brutalist ring holding modern and contemporary art amassed by one restless private collector.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. centers on a small 1964 collage by artist Romare Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual, Baptism, drawn from his memories of Southern Black life. It traces Bearden's shift from painting to cut-paper composition, and the pressure Black artists of the civil rights era faced to explain their communities to outsiders, pressure he refused. Joseph Hirshhorn, the museum's Latvian-born namesake, spent decades buying art almost compulsively on a fortune made in mining stocks.
This audio guide was created using AI.