FREE Advance Insider tickets available Friday, April 3, 7 PM (space is limited) General tickets available Monday, April 6, 7 PM We strongly recommend claiming a ticket to ensure your seat. This in-person program is expected to be at capacity. Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu Internationally acclaimed artist Thomas Houseago joins Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu in conversation for the 2026 James T. Demetrion Distinguished Artist Series. This special program offers audiences an intimate look into Houseago’s creative practice, influences, and vision and celebrates the Museum’s recent acquisition of his monumental sculpture Minotaur—Janus (2024), on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960. This annual program is made possible by the Friends of Jim and Barbara Demetrion Endowment Fund, established in 2001 to celebrate Jim Demetrion’s seventeen-year tenure as the Hirshhorn’s second director. ABOUT THE ARTIST In the mid-2000s, Thomas Houseago established his career with monumental sculptures of hulking, skeletal figures and hollow-eyed masks. Employing traditional materials—clay, plaster, wood, and bronze—as well as iron rebar and hemp, he constructs chimerical sculptures that reveal the process of their making. Passages of preparatory drawing in graphite or charcoal remain on the finished work, as do handprints and trowel marks. With raw, rough-hewn surfaces that bridge sculpture and drawing, these figures consider questions of personhood and its relationship to violence, power, and fragility. At once massive and fractured, geological and improvised, imposing and vulnerable, they hold conflicting qualities together. Around 2014, Houseago began working with immersive architectural installations, creating environments characterized by progressive spaces and plaster walls. Soon he turned to painting, continuing his exploration of the human form and investigating the medium’s capacity for meditation, movement, catharsis, and energetic expression. In recent years, following a period of recovery from trauma, Houseago began painting still-lifes and landscapes. Painted en plein air and in the artist’s studio in Malibu, California, the canvases reflect transcendental and restorative experiences with nature. Born in 1972 in Leeds, England, Houseago attended Jacob Kramer College, Leeds, where he set out doing performance work (1990–1991). In 1994, he received a degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, and from 1994 to 1996 he attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam, where he studied with Marlene Dumas. He lived in Brussels for eight years before moving in 2003 to Los Angeles, where he lives and works today. In 2010, Houseago’s first major museum solo exhibition was organized by the Modern Art Oxford and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (traveled to Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; and Centre International d’Art et du Pa...
