Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden - Reborn by Sugimoto

Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)

A stop on Washington DC National Mall Walking Tour, a free self-guided tour.

Across Jefferson Drive is the Hirshhorn's sunken Sculpture Garden, which reopened on October 31, 2026, after a four-year redesign by the Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. It is the biggest change to the museum's grounds since the Hirshhorn opened in 1974.

Sugimoto kept the garden sunk below the Mall and divided it with walls of hand-stacked stone into an East Garden, a Central Garden and a West Lawn. It now shows about 60 works, many more than before: bronzes from Joseph Hirshhorn's founding gift by Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Barbara Hepworth, along with new works by living artists. Rodin's The Burghers of Calais has a stone-walled room of its own, where you can walk around the six figures at eye level.

The old tunnel under Jefferson Drive, closed since the 1980s, has reopened as Passage of Reflectance, a mirrored walkway designed by Sugimoto that links the museum plaza and the garden.

From here, head back to the stop and continue to the Castle.

More on Wikipedia: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden · Hiroshi Sugimoto · Auguste Rodin

Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden - Reborn by Sugimoto

Stops on this tour