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WASHINGTON — This city may not have a reputation as being on the cutting edge of the international arts scene, but Melissa Chiu may be about to remedy that in her new role as director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
In her first interview since assuming her post a month ago, Ms. Chiu outlined a plan to develop the Hirshhorn, whose reputation rests largely on its collection of American and European modern and contemporary art, into more of a showcase for experimental and international works.
In keeping with that plan, Ms. Chiu has decided that her inaugural exhibition, to open next May, will feature Shirin Neshat, the Iranian-born video artist and photographer whose work has focused on modern Iranian history, such as the 1953 C.I.A.-led coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister.
“The whole art world ecology has changed,” said Ms. Chiu, an Australian who is the first non-American to run the Hirshhorn and formerly led the Asia Society Museum in New York, where she spent 13 years. “The art world has become truly transnational.”
Ms. Chiu, 42, has also decided to add a new position, a curator at large who will be based in New York City with the mission of tapping into exciting developments there and internationally to enhance exhibitions in Washington.
And she expressed an interest in expanding the way technology helps visitors appreciate the museum experience, particularly through more interactive video installations as well as ways for people to get additional information and context about works on mobile devices.
“I hope this means we are able to come up with another kind of new bold vision that has the potential to be a real game-changer in terms of contemporary art and the way technology impacts contemporary art,” she said.
The last bold vision at the Hirshhorn, a division of the Smithsonian that sits on the National Mall midway between the White House and the Capitol, did not fare so well. The plan was to install a temporary 15-story inflatable bubble that would cover the museum’s inner courtyard a few months each year.
With space for installations and performances, the bubble was promoted as a way to connect the Hirshhorn to the global conversation about art and culture, and was heralded by some as a potentially transformative departure for the museum and for the landscape of the mall.
But it was scrapped last year after rising costs, delays and a failure to attract outside funds. The episode led to the departure of Ms. Chiu’s predecessor, Richard Koshalek, who resigned when the board could not reach a consensus to support his plan. Critics said the bubble’s fate represented an unwillingness of a city long focused on the traditional, sometimes staid, vocabulary of civic monuments to embrace a more risk-taking approach.
But Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for history, art and culture, said there is no reason to view the bubble’s demise as symptomatic of a resistance to innovative approaches to art. Like the National Air and Space Museum next door, the Hirshhorn unfolds new vistas for museum visitors, he said, adding, “There is always going to be someone rattled by contemporary art, but that is a good thing.”
The Hirshhorn opened in 1974 to house a donation of nearly 6,000 works to the nation by the financier Joseph H. Hirshhorn. The collection has doubled since then, and the museum aspires to be a leading platform for contemporary art based on its strength in holdings by such artists as Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Sol LeWitt, though it is somewhat overshadowed by bigger and better known institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The new, New-York-based curator at large will be Gianni Jetzer, a former director of the Swiss Institute, an exhibition space in SoHo. His appointment represents an acknowledgment that Manhattan and its environs remain a well of contemporary creativity worth tracking.
At the same time, Ms. Chiu said it was important for the Hirshhorn to recognize that New York, London, Paris and other longtime major art centers now have competition, since important art is increasingly created in places like China and Latin America.
She credited her predecessors with recognizing that fact by staging exhibitions of works by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Sugimoto exhibition, filled with works staged in a panoramic fashion, she said, showed that the shows that work best in the Hirshhorn are those that embrace the distinctive curved spaces of its round, nearly windowless building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft.
As part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn has the advantage of having at least some of its $20 million annual budget provided by the federal government. Still, Ms. Chiu was known as a particularly able fund-raiser at the Asia Society, where she was popular with donors, and has already enlisted three benefactors from her days there to join her as trustees at the Hirshhorn.
They are Janine Hill, wife of a former Hirshhorn board chairman, J. Tomilson Hill, who resigned in 2012 over Mr. Koshalek’s continued championing of the bubble; Harold Newman, a financier and philanthropist; and Joleen Julis, a Los Angeles collector.
After his departure, Mr. Koshalek complained that Washington was a tough place to introduce unconventional ideas. Ms. Chiu, though, said she was not worried that there is a particular temperament to the city that will impede her efforts.
“The bubble was a bold idea,” she said. “Not all bold ideas come to fruition. It is worth trying something bold again.”