Intended to provide novel interpretations and fresh experiences of the historic gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, which were designed chiefly by Beatrix Farrand in the early 20th century, this program has featured installations by sculptors Charles Simonds (2009) and Patrick Dougherty (2010); designers Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot (2012), sound artist Hugh Livingston, who completed two projects (2014 and 2015), painter and sculptor Martha Jackson Jarvis (2018) and—after a hiatus caused by the Covid epidemic—sculptor Hugh Hayden (2022).

An in-depth look at just five years of work from the early 21st century by one of the most remarkable artists to come out of the American South in recent decades. Dial, who worked most of his life in heavy industry in Bessemer, Alabama, made “things” out of salvaged materials from an early age, many of which dressed his yard. Later in life, he became an astonishingly versatile painter and draftsman as well as a sculptor.

For generations, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama—a small Black community on the Alabama River—have produced remarkable quantities of distinctive, abstract-patterned quilts of extraordinary inventiveness. They represent only a fraction of African American quilts made in America, but they are in a class by themselves. Geographical and social isolation created an unusual degree of cultural coherence in Gee’s Bend: three and four generations of quilters can be identified in the same families, passing down a flair for bold and improvisational geometries that transform salvaged work cloths and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants into masterful designs. 

Current understandings of Outsider Art had their origins among European artists and mental health professionals during and just after the First World War. This exhibition was an effort to enlarge the knowledge of Outsider art in the United States by presenting a selection of some of the most compelling self-taught European artists of the first half of the 20th century, a time when the conception of Outsider art began to crystalize.

As part of a series of occasional art exhibitions hosted in conjunction with the annual Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, thirteen artists were invited to the city to propose installations of their work in the city and surrounding Low Country that might resonate with the particular cultural and natural history of the region. The invitation resulted in twelve projects by thirteen artists. Some installed existing work, while others created new site-generated projects.

“Hispanic Art in the United States” was the first major museum exhibition to focus on the extraordinary variety and richness of creativity among artists grouped under the admittedly artificial designation “Hispanic.” It featured both academically trained and self-taught artists from the major Latino groups in the country—Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans—as well as descendants of the original Spanish settlers in the Southwest and recent emigres from Latin America. Their work ranged from folk-inspired religious carving to political satire, modernist abstraction, ethnically-inflected neo-surrealism, and what was then called “new imagism,” with a preponderance of incisive, sometimes bitter, deeply expressive

The ninth in a series initiated in 1977 by Jane Livingston at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, each concentrating on a single cycle of work by one artist, intended to provide an intensified examination of the creativity of an important artist at a significant point in their career.

“Black Folk Art in America” presented the work of 20 mostly elderly, rural, and Southern African American artists who had little formal education of any kind, especially in art. Instead, they relied on personal narratives, community and political history, religious convictions, and popular culture to generate their art, which often deployed unconventional, sometimes salvaged materials. The exhibition affirmed the existence of an important tradition in American art that was being ignored by major institutions—a vast body of accomplished, compelling contemporary art that came out of distinct cultural experiences, geographical contexts, and social circumstances.

Only the second major museum exhibition to focus on land art (the first was at the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell in 1969), this exhibition focused on the monumental projects of artists such as Richard Fleischner, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Robert Morris, Charles Ross, and Robert Smithson.