National Gallery of Art (NGA)

COLLECTIONSThe National Gallery of Art's collection is at the heart of the National Gallery's mission, following founder Andrew W. Mellon's gift and mandate to establish a national gallery with works of the highest quality. The collection of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts traces the development of European achievements from the thirteenth century to the present and American art from colonial times to the present. It comprises a comprehensive study of Italian Renaissance art, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci outside Europe, as well as strong holdings of the French Impressionists, the Dutch and Flemish masters, one of the country's most distinguished American collections, and twentieth-century art. The collection also includes prints, drawings, rare books and photographs. Major post-World War II sculpture is installed in a dynamic and richly landscaped setting in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden.Reflecting and attracting the nation in our holdings is an important strategic priority of the National Gallery. This priority embraces an expanded mandate to incorporate underrepresented artists and histories to meet our desire to become a more fully evolved, equitable, and leading museum while supporting the forward movement of the National Gallery's founding collections of European and American art. In fiscal year 2022 the department of Modern and Contemporary Art acquired works of art by major national and international women artists and artists from under-represented groups, including the following acquisitions:A 1966 wall-hung work by Carla Acardi (1924-2014), the Italian artist known for her works created with the plastic material Sicofoil that challenged conventions of what a painting could be; an energetic, pedestal sculpture, "Egress" (2000), by Chakaia Booker (b. 1953), who is celebrated for her sculptures made from recycled tires that address environmental concerns and meditate on African American struggles and strength; a floor sculpture, "Correnteza" (2018), by the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes (b. 1948), featuring Gomes's signature use of fabric, which in her hands resonates with the experiences of Black, female, and marginal communities in Brazil; "Night" (1964), a large-scale work by the celebrated Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997). Other works were acquired by the following women and BIPOC artists during the fiscal year:--Carmen Herrera (1915-2022, Havana), one of the leading practitioners of abstract art who emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. We acquired Herrera's green-and-white painting, "Untitled" (2013), and her sculptural relief, "Untitled Estructura" (Yellow) (1966/2016). --Sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), known for her monumental wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. We were gifted "Untitled" (c. 1975), the first major relief by Nevelson to enter the collection.--Betye Saar (b. 1926), a pioneer of second-wave feminist and postwar Black nationalist aesthetics. The National Gallery acquired "The Trickster" (1994), a mixed-media assemblage. Saar examines the aesthetic and conceptual power of African cultural forms in this work.--Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965), best known as a painter who skillfully combines art history, queer politics, and popular culture into engaging, often fantastical figurative subjects. In 2011 Eisenman produced over sixty prints in woodcut, lithography, etching, aquatint, and monotype. We acquired "Beer Garden" (2012-2017) at nearly four feet squarewhich stands out as her most monumental print to-date.--Daniel Lind-Ramos (b. 1953) is one of the foremost contemporary artists born and based in Puerto Rico. Initially trained as a painter, he later began to work in assemblage in a way that resonates with the making-do and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora and with everyday life in his hometown, Loza. The National Gallery acquired its first work by Lind-Ramos, "Figura de Poder" (2016-2020). --Freddy Rodrguez (b. 1945) explores Caribbean and Latinx history, often focusing on the Dominican Republic's indigenous and colonial past as well as its history of enslavement, turbulent contemporary history, and the migration of Dominicans to the United States. We acquired the painting, "Paradise for a Tourist Brochure" (1990), an important work from a series devoted to unmasking the tactics of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.--Mariano Rodrguez (1912-1990) was a major figure of the "Vanguardia" (Cuban avant-garde), a multifaceted group of artists who were deeply committed to forging a modern Cuban art in the first half of the twentieth century. The National Gallery acquired Rodrguez's "Reunin en la OEA" (1965), an ambitious painting from the artist's later career. --Sculptor Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) draws inspiration from African metalworking traditions. We acquired four works from "Lynch Fragments", Edwards's most extensive and celebrated series that responds to legacies of race, labor, and oppression.--Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with themes related to identity, representation, mass media, and popular culture. The National Gallery acquired his stainless-steel wall sculpture "A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection)" (2020), which draws a fictional map of an African American continent. --Rashid Johnson (b. 1977) is a highly celebrated contemporary artist who explores African American themes and issues of racial, cultural, and gender identity in a range of media. The National Gallery acquired its first photograph by Johnson, "The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett)" (2008, printed 2022).Eight works were acquired by four modern and contemporary African American photographers. Adger Cowans (b. 1936), Chester Higgins Jr. (b. 1946), Herman Howard (1942-1980), and Herb Robinson (b. unknown). Encouraged by Gordon Parks (1912-2006) and Roy DeCarava (1919-2009), they represent an important achievement in the history of photography - they empowered themselves to represent their own Black communities during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Important works joining the historical collection included the following:--A highly detailed and exquisite portrait by the Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana, c. 1590. The portrait depicts the sixteenth-century musician, "Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni". --A spectacular, though small, pen and brown ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, "Grotesque Head of an Old Woman", 1489/1490, was gifted to the National Gallery. The drawing is one of a series of some thirty studies, highly influential, identical in small format, style, and technique that represent Leonardo's most sustained exploration of human physiognomy.--Netherlandish artist Jan Muller (1571-1628) was among the most imaginative and refined of a group of engravers that flourished between Haarlem and the imperial court at Prague around the turn of the sixteenth century. We acquired Muller's "Mercury Abducting Psyche" (c. 1597), a series of three engravings based on a 1593 sculpture of the same name by Adriaen de Vries (c. 1556-1626). --The National Gallery acquired "The Finding of Moses" (c. 1685/1690), by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1639-1709), the leading painter in late seventeenth-century Rome. The highly finished drawing, in pen and black ink with brush and gray wash and white gouache over traces of black chalk on brown laid paper, helps explain the transition from high baroque to the rococo, with its dramatic, gesturing figures and mystical fervor. The National Gallery's Conservation Division continued at its usual rapid pace in fiscal year 2022, conducting hundreds of treatments, collection maintenance, and condition examinations for the permanent collection, new acquisitions, loans, and exhibitions, and carrying out scientific research. The object conservation lab, in collaboration with many other staff throughout the National Gallery, oversaw the dramatic reinstallation of the National Gallery's iconic Alexander Calder mobile in the West Building atrium, for the third time since its installation in 1977. The refurbishment of the seventy-six-foot-long, 920-pound sculpture involved cleaning, repairing, and repainting the worn metal surfaces of its thirteen multicolored honeycomb-aluminum panels and twelve arms, steel bars, and mechanical parts, and suspending it once again from the skylights.

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONSAn integral aspect of the National Gallery's programming is organizing and presenting special exhibitions of major works of art lent from public and private collections around the world, highlighting the breadth of artistic achievement in all forms. Through collaborative relationships with other nations and museums, special exhibitions bring together great works of art and contribute to scholarship in the field. Ten exhibitions were presented during the fiscal year. Two exhibitions continuing from the previous fiscal year were "Artists Projects: Sarah Cain, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Kay Rosen and "Lynda Benglis"."Clouds, Ice and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings" depicted a rich cross section of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish life and culture that brought together twenty-seven paintings including landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael and Salomon van Ruysdael, winter scenes by Jan van Goyen and Adam van Breen, genre paintings by Dirck Hals and Caspar Netscher, seascapes by Reinier Nooms and Simon de Vlieger, still lifes by Clara Peeters and Frans Snyders, and portraits by Thomas de Keyser and Jan Miense Molenaer."Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya" presented works of early aquatints including works from the National Gallery's collection that had never been on public view. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the blossoming of a new printmaking technique, aquatint, vastly expanded possibilities for creating and disseminating images across Europe. Aquatints offered the unprecedented means to mimic the gestural brushstrokes and subtle tonal variations of ink, wash (diluted ink), and watercolor drawings.Three important photography exhibitions were presented during the fiscal year. "The New Woman Behind the Camera" featured more than 120 international photographers and explored the diverse "new women" who embraced photography as a mode of professional and personal expression from the 1920s to the 1950s. "James Van Der Zee's Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem created an extraordinary chronicle of life in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. Some forty works from the National Gallery's collection featured Van Der Zee's studio portraits, along with his photographs of Harlem nightclubs and storefronts as well as religious, social, political, and athletic community groups. Lastly, "American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams" featured some 175 works from the artist's most important projects depicting the wonder and fragility of the American landscape including pictures of suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and stores, as well as rivers, skies, the prairie, and the ocean. While these photographs lament the ravages that have been inflicted on the land, they also pay homage to what remains.For centuries, artists have told and retold the complex histories of the African Diaspora. "Afro-Atlantic Histories" took an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the seventeenth century. More than 130 powerful works of art, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and time-based media by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean brought these narratives to life.Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish immigrant to London, played a critical role in the art and life of American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler. During the early 1860s she worked closely with Whistler, primarily as a model, and is featured in numerous works by Whistler, including his three famous "Symphony in White" paintings, which were shown together for the first time in the United States. "The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler" represented the first concerted effort to better account for what is hidden in plain sight in so many of Whistler's celebrated early works: Hiffernan herself.The region of northern Europe today known as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands experienced momentous social, political, and artistic transformation from 1450 through the early 1600s, a time now called the Northern Renaissance. "The Renaissance in the North: New Prints and Perspectives" introduced the creative genius and extraordinary skill of artists and printmakers, including Albrecht Durer, Hendrick Goltzius, Erhard Schon and Jan Sadeler, who shaped the Northern Renaissance. "The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900" presented 129 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and video by more than ninety artists exploring the "double" as a major theme in art since 1900. "The Double" was the first major exhibition to consider how and why modern art and contemporary artists have employed doubled formats to explore perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes. From Matisse, Duchamp, and Gorky to Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Truitt, and Hesse, this multimedia presentation featured works by many of today's leading artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Roni Horn, and Yinka Shonibare."Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South" presented forty sculptures, assemblages, paintings, reliefs, quilts, and drawings acquired by the National Gallery in 2020 from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Of the twenty-three artists in the show, including eleven women, only one was already represented in the National Gallery's collection. While many are now celebrated, they worked for decades with little recognition, alone or in close-knit communities, often using recycled materials as their art supplies, and yards, porches, or boarded-up storefronts as their galleries. Despite racism and other forms of discrimination, they drew on deep cultural and spiritual traditions to create some of the finest art of our time, embodying qualities of formal rigor, material inventiveness, subtle storytelling, bold imagination, and powerful feeling ranging from pleasure to protest, from mourning to joy.During the fiscal year, 238 lenders from nineteen countries and twenty-five states loaned 1,182 works of art to twelve exhibitions (five special loan exhibitions and seven in-house exhibitions). The Gallery also worked on another twenty-three projects scheduled to open in the next five years and administered the tour of three exhibitions.

EDUCATION AND PUBLIC PROGRAMSThe National Gallery resumed onsite programming in fiscal year 2022 after a long period of closures due to the pandemic. Over 1,035 onsite programs including Gallery tours, artist talks, family workshops, concerts, films, and community events were offered between April and October, serving approximately 80,000 visitors. At the same time, a wide array of online programs were offered to adults and families, including talks, film screenings, artist-led workshops, and podcasts. Our 235 online programs in fiscal year 2022 served 76,813 people. Over 13,000 print resources including posters, Art Tales booklets, flyers, and bookmarks were distributed to educators in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Armed Forces of Europe, and Guam.Our multi-visit program Art Around the Corner entered a new phase adopting a community-wide approach to partner schools, offering programs for teachers, students, and local families. Since its launch in 2019, Teaching Critical Thinking through Art with the National Gallery of Art Massive Open Online Course has reached approximately 33,000 educators through course engagements and online workshops. Additionally, 367 teaching packets and DVDs have been shared with educators, complementing our robust schedule of in-person and virtual tours for K-12 students. The Digital Experience Division continued to provide transformative digital content and solutions, with our digital audience continuing to grow at an unprecedented rate. Website visits increased sixty-one percent this fiscal year to 12.4 million. In May 2022, the National Gallery launched "Artle", a daily art game that has more than doubled daily visitor traffic to the National Gallery's website, and has given our audience a new way to engage with the collection. With over six million total plays, "Artle" became one of the most popular ways people engaged with the National Gallery this year, leading to worldwide press coverage and major partnerships with other U.S. museums.Expansion in our Production Studio and collaborations on social media led to video views across our website and social channels topping 2.9 million. The National Gallery produced over sixty-three new, original videos, with our YouTube subscriber base growing by over twenty-two percent. The Imaging department continued to produce authoritative art object images for users inside and outside the National Gallery. Over the fiscal year, the department created new photography for 1,679 collection objects, including 639 new acquisitions and thirteen non-collection objects. The National Gallery Library added 7,116 print and sixty-seven e-book and e-journal titles in addition to 5,295 auction catalogs to its holdings in fiscal year 2022. The library's image collections acquired 800 rare images, including significant additions to the artist portraits collection - most notably Lewis Carroll and Louise Nevelson - and an album documenting the destruction of buildings in Paris during the Commune of 1871. The reader services department answered 3,230 inquiries, welcomed 219 new readers among 1,034 visitors on site, and recorded 173,037 unique visits to the library's web pages. The department loaned 1,332 titles to universities and public libraries in forty-seven states and twenty-five countries. Library staff produced 93,927 scans from 449 titles in its collections, including 6,523 digital reproductions. Image collections staff fulfilled more than 500 image requests, added over 260 digital images to Wikimedia, and completed thirty-six reproduction agreements, making available 431 images for print and broadcast publications in the United States and abroad.The National Gallery's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center), founded in 1979, continued its support and enhancement of scholarship in art and architecture through fellowships, research, scholarly meetings, and publications. In fiscal year 2022 the Center welcomed fellows in residence affiliated with institutions in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Highlights from the Center's academic programs included the conference "Fragments and Frameworks: Illuminated Manuscripts and Illustrated Books in Digital Humanities; the Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art "More perfect and excellent than men: Women Artists of Bologna; the Wyeth Lecture in American Art "Prioritizing Indigenous Communities and Voices: Curating in This Time; the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art cosponsored with the University of Maryland; a conversation and book signing with author and professor Mary Beard; the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora cosponsored with Howard University; a colloquy and a public lecture by Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor Aruna D'Souza on "Art Writing and Opacity; and the seventy-first A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered by Richard J. Powell.

Art acquisitions and editorial and photography