Top 200 Collector Emily Wei Rales Charts the Future of Glenstone, the Idyllically Set Maryland Museum She Cofounded

Emily Wei Rales is director and cofounder of Glenstone, a museum in Potomac, Maryland, that integrates contemporary art, architecture, and nature. Trained in art history and Chinese studies at Wellesley College, she worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the exhibition “China: 5,000 Years” and at New York City art galleries, including Barbara Gladstone, prior to joining her husband, Mitchell P. Rales, in cofounding Glenstone Foundation and Glenstone Museum.

When Mitch and I set out to create a museum more than 15 years ago, three tenets guided our thinking: First, we were committed to building a collection of post–World War II art that represents the most significant artistic innovations of our time. Second, we wanted to locate the museum not in an urban area but in Potomac, Maryland, within a setting that holistically integrates art, architecture, and nature. Finally, we embraced the counterintuitive notion of “less is more” in our approach to the visitor experience, which we designed to be slow, uncrowded, and meditative. We opened Glenstone Museum to the public in the fall of 2006 with the completion of our first building, the Gallery, which was designed by Charles Gwathmey. From the very beginning we asked visitors to schedule a visit ahead of time to preserve a quiet, unhurried atmosphere. Admission is—and always will be—free.

This past June marked 10 years since we broke ground on a major expansion effort that culminated in the opening of the Pavilions, a building designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners that incorporates generous landscape vistas and ample natural lighting throughout the interior spaces. The expansion increased our total indoor exhibition space from 9,000 to 59,000 square feet and added an extensive network of walking trails as well as two cafés, a bookstore, an Arrival Hall, and an Environmental Center to showcase our sustainable and regenerative landscape management practices. The groundbreaking coincided with two other important events: the unveiling of Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker (2000), a living outdoor sculpture with more than 24,000 individual flowers that bloom from May through October, and the first exhibition at Glenstone to focus on a single career, that of the Swiss collaborative duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

After seeing Fischli and Weiss’s traveling retrospective at Tate Modern in 2006, we began collecting their work in depth, captivated by their ingenious use of humble materials and the astonishing variety of forms and concepts they tackle in their practice. We commissioned The Objects for Glenstone (2010–11), the artists’ most ambitious polyurethane tableau consisting of more than 500 individually carved and painted replicas of commonplace items that filled the artists’ studio. We presented the installation in 2011 as part of our third exhibition, “No Substitute,” just before David’s untimely passing in 2012. The following year we approached Peter with a proposal for an exhibition: the first American survey of their career since 1996 to be hosted at Glenstone. It was a turning point for us, as it would be the first time we undertook an in-depth exploration of a single body of work. Since then, while still organizing survey exhibitions drawn from our collection, we also mount monographic exhibitions, collaborating closely with the artists or their foundations. These include career-spanning shows of Fred Sandback, Roni Horn, Louise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold, Doris Salcedo, and Jeff Wall. The works in these monographic exhibitions were drawn almost exclusively from Glenstone’s holdings, with the exception of the Ringgold exhibition, which originated in London at the Serpentine Galleries. When we were approached by the Serpentine to be the only US venue for the international tour, we seized the opportunity to highlight Ringgold’s formidable output by supplementing the checklist with 62 additional loans from the artist, private collections, and museums. Although the exhibition opened in April 2021 during Covid-19 restrictions, it remains one of our most highly visited exhibitions to date.

Currently on view, through March 2024, is “Ellsworth Kelly at 100,” the largest and most comprehensive exhibition since the artist’s death in 2015. We decided to organize this show out of a desire to honor Kelly’s legacy with an extensive career survey that spans more than six decades, an effort that required securing loans from the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, private collections, and nine major museums. Among the institutional lenders is Centre Pompidou which generously agreed to lend Kelly’s seminal 1949 work, Window, Museum of Modern Art, the centerpiece of the first room in the exhibition. After “Ellsworth Kelly at 100” concludes at Glenstone, it will tour to two overseas venues, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Fire Station in Doha, Qatar, which will be the first time Kelly’s work will be shown in the Gulf region. While all my encounters with artists have changed how I look at and think about art, the transformation that came about from my friendship with Ellsworth was especially meaningful. His sense of wonder was infectious. I recall all the times he would lean in conspiratorially to talk about the color of an object nearby, eager to discuss whether a green was more emerald or viridian. Each time I walk through this show—particularly the room where Yellow Curve (1990) is on display—I think of how delighted Ellsworth would be to see the awestruck expressions on the faces of our visitors.

At Glenstone, we strive to provide a contemplative experience that allows each visitor ample time and space with the works on view. When we first opened in 2006, our model was appointment-only and docent-led, with a staff member walking visitors through the Gallery and grounds. To prepare for the expansion we collected information on the amount of square footage visitors usually occupy in museums and developed a formula for calculating the number of visitors Glenstone could accommodate without compromising the relaxed, unhurried atmosphere. Since then, our visitor attendance has grown organically. As we learned more about how visitors wanted to experience Glenstone by seeking their feedback, we moved toward a more self-guided, self-directed experience. With time, we’ve incrementally expanded our footprint, both outdoors and in the galleries, finding ways to welcome more visitors while preserving the serene, meditative experience that is our essence. Today, we have a more flexible attendance policy that includes guaranteed entry for educators, students, active-duty military and veterans, museum professionals, and people who arrive on public transportation. In this way, we boosted our attendance to a record 103,000 visitors in 2022—and we expect to increase this figure by 30 percent by the end of this year.

The outdoor program continues to flourish. Sculptures by Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Goldsworthy, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Koons have since been joined by major works by Charles Ray, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Robert Gober. In July 2022 we opened a new building to house the museum’s third outdoor work by Serra, a monumental forged-steel sculpture in four parts. Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017) is now permanently on view in a pavilion designed by Phifer in close collaboration with the artist. A gently curving boardwalk leads visitors to the spare concrete structure through an existing wetland ecosystem that was painstakingly preserved and enhanced by our horticultural team with guidance from our landscape designer, Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architecture. During construction, we limited any disturbance to the landscape and supplemented the existing flora with native, deer-resistant plants, to combat the growth of any non-native species. Because the grounds at Glenstone are maintained organically, pesticides and herbicides are not entering the water table, further helping to preserve the health of the wetland ecosystem.

This spring, we presented our first temporary outdoor installation: Kara Walker’s The Katastwóf Karavan (2017), a sculpture that combines the artist’s signature silhouetted figures with a steam-powered calliope, a musical instrument popular at carnivals and on riverboats during the 19th century. Through image and sound, the work, which first debuted at the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans, memorializes the legacy of slavery while playing music in the Black tradition selected by Walker, from spirituals and gospel to soul and funk. Activated once a week, the Karavan suffuses Glenstone’s typically quiet environment with poignant melodies, inviting visitors to congregate and linger in its midst. Additionally, we are currently working on several outdoor projects that will be announced in the coming months, including works by Alex da Corte, Simone Leigh, and Arthur Jafa.

This fall we will be returning to our foundations as well as charting new territory. In November, we will open “Iconoclasts,” a permanent collection presentation in the Gallery highlighting works that track many of the artistic, political, and cultural shifts of the past century. Covering a wide range of media to highlight the spirit of experimentation that artists embraced during the era, the exhibition will span 100 years of art history, showcasing recent acquisitions and revealing new connections across the collection. Among the artists included are Hilma af Klint, Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Kazuo Shiraga, Nam June Paik, Lygia Pape, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten, Miyoko Ito, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, David Hammons, Martin Puryear, Barbara Kruger, and Kerry James Marshall.

Through Glenstone Foundation, the philanthropic entity that supports the Museum, we are also doing more outside of Maryland. This past year the Foundation made a major gift to The Studio Museum in Harlem to fully endow its Artist in Residence program, one of the most important incubators of Black artistic talent. We also joined with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas, to create an endowment for the Triple Aught Foundation, which manages and operates Michael Heizer’s City (1972–2022), the artist’s vast outdoor artwork located in the Nevada desert.

Over the next few years, we will turn our attention toward developing clarity of purpose and a long-term strategy for Glenstone’s philanthropic activities. In broad terms, Glenstone Foundation’s mission will be to bolster the arts and education in the US, both of which have been chronically underfunded. The need to support them and to empower America’s youth to engage with art has never been more urgent than it is today. If the past century has shown us anything about artists, it is that they have an almost boundless capacity not only to confront some of the most harrowing events in modern history, but also to affirm the values that we hold dear as a society. 

A version of this article appears in the 2023 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.