American artist Arthur Jafa plans to unveil a permanent piece at the private Glenstone Museum in the Potomac, Maryland suburb of Washington, DC. Emily Wei Rales, co-founder, chief curator and director of the museum, revealed on the podcast The art world: what if…? ! that “we are working with Arthur Jafa on something very special, and I can’t say more because it’s just the beginning. But he is considering a permanent installation of his work here at Glenstone”.
Jafa is known for her complex yet radical moving images, including the searing seven-minute film Love is the message, the message is death (2016), which evocatively conveys the experiences of black American communities, bringing together clips from sources such as newscasts, police footage and pop videos to Kanye West’s 2016 song Ultra-light beam. (Jafa’s work was previously the subject of long term display unveiled at Glenstone in 2021.)
“[Jafa] go to these places where a lot of artists or a lot of people wouldn’t dare to go,” Rales told podcast host Charlotte Burns (a former editor To The arts journal). “Having been on the fringes of the art world for so long because he was a cinematographer, he could see what was going on, but he wasn’t quite into it. So he has a kind of freedom to experiment.
Rales adds, “Hearing artists who have made social justice a core part of their practice is another thing I want to explore – artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier, for whom her artistic practice and the work she does in communities are one and the same. I’m thinking of setting up an advisory board of people like that who have given themselves permission to think much more broadly about the art world because the art world is very small.
Glenstone is home to the foundation’s collection, which was created by Mitchell Rales, co-founder of conglomerate Danaher Corporation whose personal net worth is $5.6 billion according to Forbes— and his wife Emily, who co-founded the institution in 2006. The couple live on the surrounding property, which covers 300 acres of natural pasture and woods overseen by the foundation.
Earlier this year, the Glenstone Foundation, which supports the Glenstone Museumreceived a $1.9 billion donation by Mitchell Rales. The extraordinary sum – one of the largest gifts ever made to the arts – brings the foundation’s total net assets to $4.6 billion, nearly equaling that of the most visited museum in North America , the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to Bloomberg.
On the podcast, Emily Wei Rales said of the donation, “$1.9 billion isn’t enough in perpetuity, so this is just the first installment we’re sending to the foundation and more will follow over time. “
Host Charlotte Burns also discusses Glenstone’s next hit show, Ellsworth Kelly—Ellsworth Kelly at 100 (May 4-March 2024) – which is to tour the Middle East. “[It is] the centenary of his birth, and it is an important investigative program which opens in May. He will travel to Paris at the Louis Vuitton Foundation next spring. Next, he will go to the Doha Fire Station in Qatar this fall, which will be Ellsworth Kelly’s first time to the area. It will present 70 works by [the Glenstone] collection, as well as [works from] major museum lenders,” says Burns.
Asked why Glenstone primarily collects and exhibits Western artists, Rales replies: “So I made the 180 degree turn because I have Chinese heritage, and a lot of these objects and artefacts are grave goods, funerary artifacts. Something in me felt fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of these things coming from cemeteries and heading to market and being sold to American and European collections. She adds: “I felt like I was turning my back on a part of my history and I was not responsible for these objects.”
Rales also reveals how the museum commissions studies of visitor figures, comparing Glenstone to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “While the Broad and the Whitney each welcomed around 1 million visitors in 2019, we welcomed a tenth of that number in our first year of operation,” Rales said. written in 2020adding that the plan is to give visitors a “slow, quiet” and contemplative experience.
“Most museums aren’t going to commission studies like this because they don’t care about density. How we arrived at those numbers was pretty easy. You just looked at the annual attendance at a place like the Guggenheim. You calculate the number of square feet available for the public to occupy. And then you just figured it out,” Rales adds.
