Washington has a luminous new reason to visit the National Mall. The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has just opened Light Is a Plastic Medium: The Photography of Carlotta Corpron, a joyful survey celebrating one of the pioneers of abstract photography in the United States. The exhibition opened on October 16, 2026, and runs through March 14, 2027, with free admission.
Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988) was an American photographer and educator who turned light itself into her favorite material. Working in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, she experimented with reflections, shadows and everyday objects until photographs stopped describing the world and started singing on their own. Her investigations into the poetics of light and form, and her innovative use of technology, helped establish photography as a fine art.
The show brings together six bodies of work and showcases 48 recent gifts from Herbert Lust to the Hirshhorn, along with additional loans from his collection. Corpron spent most of her career far from the big art capitals, teaching in Denton, Texas, yet she moved in the same creative orbit as Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes. Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu has called her a trailblazing artist who has not yet received the recognition she deserves — and this exhibition happily sets out to change that.
The Hirshhorn is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Mondays from noon to 5:30 p.m., and no passes are needed. Happy City News invites you to slow down, look closely, and let Corpron’s dancing light brighten your day.
Photo: National Park Service / Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
