Washington has a wonderful reason to look ahead to spring. The National Gallery of Art has announced Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture, the first exhibition ever devoted to the fragment as an artistic idea across time and place, opening in the West Building on March 13, 2027, and running through June 27, 2027.
The show brings together more than 70 works from over 50 lenders around the world, many never before on view in the United States. Its journey through millennia includes the famous right hand of a colossal statue of the Roman emperor Constantine, on loan from Rome’s Capitoline Museum; a rare life-size sculpture of a woman from the ancient Mexican city of Tamtoc, discovered in 2005; and a Greek statue of a boy recovered in 1900 from an ancient shipwreck after two thousand years on the seafloor.
Visitors will also encounter a terracotta figure by Michelangelo and works by modern and contemporary artists including El Anatsui, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin, Danh Vo and Fred Wilson, who have embraced fragmentation as a creative, hopeful act. A companion installation in the museum library, Ode to the Broken, opens April 5, 2027.
Organized with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where it is on view first, and curated by C. D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears with Arturo Galansino, the exhibition is a joyful reminder that even a fragment can tell a whole, moving story. Admission to the National Gallery of Art is always free.
Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington
