Washington’s National Gallery of Art has added around 190 works spanning five centuries, widening the stories its collection can tell.
On 19 August 2026, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced a major group of acquisitions encompassing painting, sculpture, prints, installation and photography. The National Gallery of Art acquisitions introduce several artists to the US national collection for the first time while strengthening its holdings in modern art, contemporary practice and colonial Latin American art.
A collection expands across centuries
The museum’s announcement moves from a rare 17th-century Mexican batea and an early modern Spanish devotional painting to works made in the 2020s. Among the headline additions is Wifredo Lam’s 1944 painting L’esprit veillant (The Watchful Spirit), created after the artist returned to Cuba. The work fuses artistic languages developed across Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas, and is the first Lam painting to enter the collection.
Marie Bracquemond’s Marguerite, painted around 1874, is another significant arrival. The scene draws on Goethe’s Faust to consider the position of women in 19th-century Paris. Previously shown at the gallery in Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, it is now the first major work by Bracquemond to join an American public collection.
New names reshape the national story
The acquisitions are notable not only for their scale but for the number of artists newly represented. They include LaToya Hobbs, Lorraine O’Grady, Jordan Ann Craig, Lehuauakea and Christina Quarles. Quarles’s 2024 painting Turn Around, Don’t carries an especially immediate history: according to the museum, it was among the few completed works to survive the 2025 Eaton Fire that destroyed her Altadena home and studio.
Other additions complicate familiar histories of American art. Five woodblock prints from T.C. Cannon’s 1978 “Memorial Suite” place Native community members in modern settings, while three LaToya Hobbs woodcuts explore motherhood, beauty and Black womanhood. A group of photographs by Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel brings fashion, portraiture and New York City Ballet into dialogue.
Breadth becomes an argument
Seen together, the National Gallery of Art acquisitions make breadth an institutional argument. They connect Indigenous materials, Caribbean modernism, queer portraiture, social history and experimental photography without reducing them to a single chronology. That range also changes who can be encountered inside a collection often associated with a more conventional Western canon.
As The Art Newspaper reported, the group comprises about 190 objects acquired since March. The museum’s full announcement details how purchases and gifts are creating new points of entry into five centuries of art. Several works, including Lam’s painting and Fritz Scholder’s bronze Future Clone, are already on view.
Image: Marie Bracquemond, Marguerite, c. 1874, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Fund, 2026.9.1. Public domain, courtesy National Gallery of Art. The work is one of the acquisitions announced on 19 August 2026.