Our staff is constantly looking for new ways to keep our audiences excited and engaged—and the recent move of our Renaissance and Baroque art collection to our upstairs galleries while our Kress Gallery was being renovated is a good example. In addition to hanging contemporary artworks alongside classics by masters like Rembrandt and Canaletto, to create new context and inspire new ways of looking at both, we included response walls in the galleries featuring the New Conversations exhibition that allowed our visitors to respond to various prompts about the works in the galleries (e.g., “What would you title these works?”; “What are they thinking?”).
During its run from November 16, 2024, through July 13, 2025, New Conversations also engaged museumgoers by inviting them to cast their vote each month for a work of art in the exhibition that best illustrates a particular superlative. And the results are in!
Superlative Winners
Detail from Lorenzo Lotto (Italian, ca. 1480 1556), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, 1515, oil on canvas. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1960. (1960.27)
Best Beast
November 2024
Frans Hals (Dutch, ca. 1581-1666), Portrait of Cornelis Coning, 1630, oil on canvas. Bequest of Mrs. Joseph V. McMullan, 1981. (1981.30)
Best Dressed
December 2024
Sassiest
March 2025
Stephen Antonakos (American, born Greece, 1926-2013), Terrain #13, 2012, German double deep 22 karat gold leaf on Tyvek, crumpled. Gift of Naomi S. Antonakos in Memory of Ida Tuttle Spector, 2023.
Best Use of Gold
January 2025
Ilse Getz (American, born Germany, 1917–1992), The Unknown, 1972, painted wood and paper construction. Gift of the Artist in Memory of David Getz, 1973. (1973.10)
Most Mysterious
February 2025
Detail from Cornelis de Heem (Flemish, 1631-1695), Still Life with Fruit, ca. 1655-57, oil on canvas. Purchase: Gift of John and Fannie Saeger, 1974. (1974.72)
Most Likely to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
April 2025
Detail from Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626-1679), Soo de Ouden Songen, Soo Pijpen de Jongen (As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young), ca. 1668, oil on panel. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961. (1961.60)
Best to Have on a Desert Island
May 2025
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669), Portrait of a Young Woman, 1632, oil on panel. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.
Most Likely to be Haunted
June/July 2025