Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Yearning for a new, more empathetic world? New York Times art critic Aruna D’Souza knows art can lead us there.

Watch as Aruna D’Souza examines works in our collection that hold the promise of a better future in her series 5 Pictures for a New World.

Eva Hesse learned alongside pioneers of 1960s minimalism in New York like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, and more. Then she pushed her art in a “radically different direction.”

Part of a larger piece Hesse created, “Test Piece for ‘Contingent’” plays off of gravity and presents flesh-like material suspended in air.

Hesse invited the idea that this sculpture would “decay and crumble over time” as a way to “replicate our human experience.”

View Eva Hesse’s “Test Piece for ‘Contingent’” in our online collection: nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.97499.html

Aruna D’Souza was the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 2022: nga.gov/research/casva.html

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